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ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 



Books by 
EDITH O'SHAUGHNESSY 

ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 
MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 
DIPLOMATIC DAYS 



HARPER & BROTHERS. NEW YORK 

[Established 1S17] 



ALSACE 

IN RUST AND GOLD 



EDITH O'SHAUGHNESSY 

[MRS. NELSON o'SHAUGHNESSY] 

AUTHOR OF 

"A Diplomat's Wife in Mexico" 
"My Lorraine Journal" Etc. 

ILLUSTRATED 




HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 



APR -6 fS20 



Alsace in Rust and Gold 



%4' 



Copyright 1920, by Harper & Brothers 

Printed in the United States of America 

Published March, 1920 

BU 



©C(.A566379 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

Preface ix 

I. The journey there . i 

II. All Saints' Day, November, 1918 13 

III. FiXE DBS MORTS, NOVEMBER, IQiS 23 

IV. Thann and old Thann 34 

V. The Ballon d' Alsace 43 

VI. La popote 55 

VII. The houses of the chanoinesses 65 

VIII. Luncheon at Bitschwiller. The mission in residence 

AT St.-Amarin. Saint-Odile 81 

IX. The "Field of Lies" and Laimbach 100 

X. The valley of the Thur no 

XI. The re-Gallicizing of Alsace 120 

XII. The Hartmannswillerkopf 131 

XIII. "Les CidiTES." "Dejeuner" at Camp Wagram. The 

Freundstein and its phantoms 140 

XIV. Return to Masevaux 156 

XV. The vigil of the armistice 159 

XVI. Dies gloria 175 



ILLUSTRATJONS 

The River DOLLER at MaSEVAUX Frontispiece 

The Fourth of July, 1918, in Alsace Facing page 14 

Place du Marche, Masevaux, Jxjly 14, 1918 ... " 14 

Thann and Its Vineyards " 34 

Commandant Poulet " 56 

Thann. The Cathedral Portal " 82 

Thann. La Vieille Tour " 114 

American Troops at Masevaux Celebrating the 

Fourth of July " 132 

French Troops at Masevaux Celebrating the 

Fall of the Bastile, July 14TH " 132 

America and Alsace " 172 



PREFACE 

Strangely caught up out of the rut and routine of 
Paris war-work, not even choosing my direction (the 
Fates did that), contributing, however, the eternal readi- 
ness of my soul, which the poet says is all, I was con- 
veyed, as on a magic carpet, to the blue valleys and the 
rust and gold and jasper hills of Alsace, where the color 
is laid on thick, thick. There I was one, during many 
historic days, of the delightful group of blue-clad, 
scarred, decorated officers forming the French Military 
Mission, which since the autumn of 19 14 had adminis- 
tered the little reconquered triangle of Alsace and 
planted in it the seed for the re-GalUcizing of Alsace- 
Lorraine. It was a bit of French history in the making, 
which detached itself quite peculiarly free from the mass 
of war happenings, somewhat as a medallion from that 
against which it is placed. 

My Httle book shows how humanly and simply the 
men of the French Military Mission, accustomed to 
supreme events, together with a woman from over the 
seas, lived through those thirteen historic days preceding 
the armistice. It will perhaps be worth the reader's 
while — I mean the nice, bright, perceptive reader's 
while — for mostly the throbbing, high-colored beauty of 
Alsace is veiled by dusty, argumentative, statistical 
pamphlets, so many of which are printed, so few of 
which are read. I once saw a great building full of such, 
and dozens of them were presented me for my sins, 
though I had never thought to read another book on 
Alsace, much less to write one. I see once again how 



PREFACE 

foolish is the man or woman who says to the fountain, 
"I will never more drink of thy water." 

In this record there are no polemics and no statistics. 
I have added nothing to each day's happenings, which 
run along as life is apt to run along, even in supreme 
moments, and, Heaven help me, I have concealed noth- 
ing. It is because of all this that perhaps those who, 
like myself, have wept much and laughed much in their 
lives, will not ungladly accompany me to a corner on the 
sorrowful and glorious chart of the autumn of 1918. 

Edith O'Shaughnessy. 

Paris, 33 rue de l'Universit6, 
February, 1919. 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 



ALSACE 
IN RUST AND GOLD 



THE JOURNEY THERE 

AND this is what a woman was thinking, as she 
i\ walked the platform of the Gare de I'Est at seven 
o'clock on a foggy October morning of 1918, waiting to 
take the train to the front. 

"Why, when trials and tribulations await us in every 
land, when every dearest affection is accompanied by its 
related grief and every achievement by the phantom of 
its early hope — ^why this illimitable ardor of the soul, 
pressing us forward into new combinations?" . . . 

A few days before I had learned that Masevaux, the 
capital of that small triangle of Alsace, reconquered 
since the August of 19 14, would be my journey's term. 
Looking in the guide-book, I found Masevaux at the 
very end — on page four hundred and ninety, to be pre- 
cise, and the book has but four hundred and ninety- 
nine pages in all — and it had seemed far, far, and the 
world an immensity, with few corners for the heart. I 
have realized since that it was only the chill of the un- 
known into which I was to venture, drawn inevitably as 
steel to the magnet or the needle to the north, by that 
very ardor of the soul. . . . 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

I had not slept at all the night before — I never do 
when I am to take an early train to pass out into new 
ways — and the somewhat dispiriting influences of "that 
little hour before dawn" were still with me as I stepped 
into my compartment and took my seat, while a captain 
of dragoons lifted my small leather valise and my not 
large Japanese straw basket to the rack. Settling my- 
self, a bit chilly, into the depths of my fur coat, slipped 
on over my uniform, I looked out upon the throng of 
officers and soldiers, as many Americans as French, 
perhaps even more. 

Standing near my window was a blue-clad colonel, 
with many decorations and a black band on his arm. 
He was carrying a small bouquet of what seemed like 
wild-flowers, and he embraced in farewell a woman 
in deepest black who would bear no more children. . . . 

Then a very young, crape-clad mother, carrying 
several pasteboard boxes, with three small children 
clinging to her skirts, hurried down the platform to get 
into a third-class compartment. 

But with it all I was conscious that the blue and khaki 
war was receding, its strange deeds, which had seemed 
cut in such high relief, were even then blurred against 
the red background, the background itself fading. 
"Eyes look your last, arms take your last embrace" 
of the world horror, the world beauty, where sorrow 
has so often been above sorrow and where many ' ' chari- 
ots have been burned to smoke." . . . 

In the compartment are five French officers with dark 
rings under their eyes. I don't know whether it is 
wounds or the effects of the perm.''- Anyway, they 
almost immediately take attitudes inviting slumber. A 
young woman all in purple, whether third or fourth 
mourning I know not (it's well done, though it couldn't 
pass unnoticed), sits by one of the windows and waggles 

* Permission. 



THE JOURNEY THERE 

a short- vamped, very-high-heeled, bronze-shoed foot and 
rattles a gold vanity-box. From the neighboring com- 
partment came classic expressions: "Can you beat it?" 
and "Search me." My heart salutes the Stars and 
Stripes. The whistle blows, and the train starts for the 
very end of the guide-book. 

8.30. — Read the masterly editorial of Jacques Bain- 
ville in V Action Frangaise, "Ou est le pi^ge? " ("Where 
is the snare?") while going through the ugliest suburbs 
in the world, inclosing the most beautiful city in the 
world. And more beautiful than ever is Paris in uni- 
form. Her delicate gray streets are mosaicked in hori- 
zon-blue, burnished with khaki, aglitter with decora- 
tions. (Oh, those men of the alert, expectant step, or 
those other broken ones dragging themselves along on 
canes and crutches!) Who has not seen Paris in uni- 
form knows not her beauty, bright and terrible as an 
army in array; enchantment for the eye, bitter-sweet 
wine for the soul. And again, who has not seen her 
violet-nighted, black-girdled by the river, wearing for 
gems a rare emerald or ruby or sapphire light, and 
silent in her dark, enfolding beauty, knows her not. 
So lovers will remember her, and those whose sons are 
gone. 

Q.30. — Looking out of the window on fields and 
forests and groves. White-stemmed, yellow-leaved 
birches burn like torches in a pale, thin mist. The 
plowed fields are black with crows ; it would seem to 
be a good year for them. We are due at Belfort at 
3.35, but a large-paunched, very loquacious man block- 
ing the corridor — his voice has not ceased since we 
started — tells a fellow-passenger that, with the delays 
caused by the shifting of troops and material, we'll be 
lucky if we get there by seven. 

10. JO. — Rampillon with its beautiful old church, hav- 
ing two rows of Gothic windows and several medieval 

3 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

towers, seen from a foreground of smooth tilled fields. 
Over the green and yellow and brown world stretches 
a silver heaven, tarnished with yellowish-gray clouds. 

Longueville. — Interminable trains of French and 
American troops cross one another. The French train 
has various barometrical indications of war-weather 
in chalk. Guillaume, O Id, Id, Id Id; and the favorite 

and unrepeatable word mingles with Le plaisir 

d'aller d Paris, les belles filles. Adieu d jamais, Boches. 

The cars containing American troops are inarticu- 
late. They haven't been at it long enough to express 
themselves. 

The handsome young officer next me opens conver- 
sation by asking me for my U Action Frangaise. Hav- 
ing previously torn out the article of Jacques Bainville, 
and wiped the windows with the rest, I pass it over to 
him with a smile. It wasn't tempting. 

A group of Americans are standing in the corridor. 
I hear, "I'd like to burn the Rhine." And the answer: 
"I don't care what you burn, but I don't ever want 
to see the Statue of Liberty from this side again. Me 
for home. There's more in it in one week in the clinic 
in little old Chicago than here in a month, in spite of 
the hunks of material. Leaving some to die or band- 
aging men in a hurry that you'll never see again, and 
dead tired all the time. No, siree ! No war thrills for 
me." And then, all being devotees of Esculapius, they 
fall to talking about diseases, civil as well as military. 

The loquacious party (he hasn't stopped even to 
take breath) says to his companion that he's going to 
surprise his wife, who thinks he's in Paris. Whatever 
else she's enjoying, she must be enjoying the silence, 
and I do hope he'll make a lot of noise when he opens 
the door. 

The young French officer next me with the Legion 
d'Honneur, Croix de Guerre, four palms and two stars, 

4 



THE JOURNEY THERE 

tells me he is with the Americans at Langres, which is 
catnoufle these war-days as A. P. O. 714, the ancient 
hill-town of the Haute-Mame being the setting for the 
celebrated "University" of the A. E. F. 

II o'clock, Romilly. — Near here, in the old Abbey of 
Scellieres, was buried Voltaire, Venjant gdU du monde 
qu'il gdta ("spoiled child of the world that he spoiled"), 
having been refused ecclesiastical burial in Paris. And 
from here he journeyed in his dust to the Pantheon. 

At St.-Mesmin the sun came out, and the dull, 
plowed fields were suddenly spread with great covers, 
as of old-gold velvet, tucked in about the slender feet 
of pine forests. 

Now all this pleasant soil of France has many his- 
tories, and St.-Mesmin is where the priest Maximin 
(you see whence the name) was sent by the Bishop of 
Troyes to implore the mercy of Attila in favor of the 
great city. For answer the terrible king of the Huns 
put him to death. Against the sky is the tower of a 
twelfth-century church. A collection of objects in a 
field that I thought were plows turned out to be 
cannon, 

Troyes. — Not a glimpse of the cathedral. Immeas- 
urably long troop-train fills the station on one side of 
us. On the other a gorgeous (it's the only word for it) 
American Red Cross train. Pressed against the win- 
dows, lying or sitting, were pale men of my race. I 
waved and smiled, and languid hands went up in 
answer. The box cars on the other side were filled 
with blue- clad men. Over the doors were green 
boughs, on the sides chalked portraits of the Kaiser, 
Dur d croquer, Mort a Guillaume, etc. And everywhere 
the once so familiar On les aura is converted into Nous 
les avons} Through the slits in the top of the cars 
were faces of poilus looking out, just as one sees cattle 

1 "We'll get them," and "we've got them." 

5 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

looking out; then a long line of other box cars with 
American, khaki-capped heads also looking out of the 
slits in the top, while the side doors too were crowded 
with sitting, standing, leaning doughboys. Again I 
waved from my window, and every cap was lifted. 

There was a young man standing at the door of some 
sort of a refrigerator car, and he wore a wonderful goat- 
skin coat. Being so near my window I spoke to him, 
and said: 

"It's a fine coat you are wearing." 

"I'll tell you in the spring," was the prompt answer. 
"They've just given them out to us. You try living next 
to the cold storage." He then proceeded to blow into 
some mottled fingers, after which he pulled a long tuft 
of hair from his coat. "I'm molting," he added, as 
he held it up, "and winter's coming." 

And he didn't know whence he had come nor whither 
he was going. Then either his train moved or mine did 
— I couldn't tell which — and I saw him no more. 

VandoBuvres-sur-Barse. — ^Wood, wood, piled high on 
every kind of wheeled thing. Forests from which it 
had been cut showing sharp and thin, fringing the gold- 
brown fields under the luminous noonday heaven. And 
here for a moment the green was so delicate and the yel- 
low so tender, that I had a fleeting illusion of spring as 
I looked out. 

Then I fell to talking with some young officers of the 
131st Artillery from Texas, but nothing that I remember. 
They had made no impression on France, neither did 
France seem to have made any impression on them. 

Bar-sur-Aube. — Old houses, old walls, blue hills, a 
white road leading over one of them. Strange church 
tower, with a round, many-windowed top, and in each 
window hangs an old bell. A great trainload of Amer- 
ican infantry "going up," the station, too, flooded with 
khaki, and another train passed crowded with poilus 

6 



THE JOURNEY THERE 

evidently en permission, making rather fundamental 
toilets. 

And around about Bar, as we slipped out, was a silver- 
vaulted world of terra-cotta and purple hills, green and 
brown fields, silver hayricks, silver sheep grazing near, 
and warm, brindled cattle, many green-painted bee- 
hives, and fruit trees trained against pink walls. Gentle 
slopes, later to become the Alps, appeared, and beech 
forests, like very worn India shawls, clung to them, and 
a row of nearby poplars had each its nimbus of yellow 
light. 

About this time, having had a hasty cup of tea at 
six, I began to be so hungry that the luster went from the 
landscape and my eyes received nothing more. I didn't 
care whether the talkative man gave his wife a surprise 
or not, and the two Americans of the Texan Artillery 
section had long since also ceased to interest me, when I 
heard a "nosy" voice saying: 

"Gosh! I tell you, boys, there's big money to be made 
over here after the war. All you have to do is to hang 
out the sign, 'American Dentist,' and your waiting- 
room '11 burst." I sat down and nearly slept by the side 
of the six-foot dozing handsome officer, with the beau- 
tiful blue uniform, and yellow pipings on his trousers 
and cap, and five service and three wound stripes, and 
the number 414 on his collar, besides a lot of decorations 
on his breast. 

1.30, Chaumont. — Sitting in the dining-car, finishing 
an excellent lunch. Of course, in common with the 
rest of the world, I've heard a good deal about Chau- 
mont, but I can say that on the word of honor of an 
honest woman the only thing I saw in khaki in that 
famous station of the A. E. F. Headquarters was an 
emaciated Y. M. C. A. man about five feet four inches 
high, with an umbrella and a straw basket. 

Of course, I'm familiar with the phrases, "Chaumont 

7 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

has put its foot down," "Chaumont won't have it," 
"Everything will be decided at Chaumont"; and once, 
entering a Paris restaurant, I heard the words, "It's 
all Chaumont 's fault." 

Then the fog closed in, a thick, impenetrable fog, and 
that's all I know or ever will know of Chaumont, as I'm 
going back to Paris via Nancy. So be it. 

On a nearby new railroad embankment, the figure of 
a poilu — the classic figure — the coat pinned back from 
his knees, bayoneted rifle over his shoulder, loomed up 
immeasurably large in the fog, while he watched the 
labors of a lusty, husky set of German prisoners, the 
familiar "P. G. " ^ stamped on their backs. A little 
farther along was another laughing, rosy-faced group 
of four of the same, watched over by one of their own 
under-ofhcers. I could only see his field-gray back 
stamped with his P. G., but as his men were so unre- 
strainedly hilarious, there is no reason to suppose that 
he was frowning. 

4 o'clock, Culmont-Chalindrey. — Already three hours 
late. Fog-enveloped train of box cars filled with slightly 
wounded doughboys peering through the narrow slit 
at the top, bandaged eyes, noses, the same kind of 
groups looking out of the door. Suddenly everything 
seems dreary. I am tired, and wonder why, oh! why I 
came, and if the war is going to last forever and forever, 
and it is the hour of the day when those who have not 
slept the night before know profound discouragement and 
the noonday devil has ceased to walk, flicking his whip. 

Vitrey. — Station full of Americans and wood — wood 
— ^wood, as if every tree in France had been cut. "Wood 
by the pound is how you buy it over here, all the same," 
disdainfully remarked the Minnesotan artilleryman 
serving in the Texan regiment, as we stood looking out 
of the window. 

^ Prisonnier de Guerre (Prisoner of War). 

8 



THE JOURNEY THERE 

And if the journey down seems long, remember that 
life, too, is made up of wearisome and long things — 
that it is indeed but a pilgrimage, and mostly through 
a land more desert than this of Burgundy. 

And in the end this book may justify itself, though 
of that I know as little as you. 

At Vitrey there is a detachment of mustard-tinted, 
khaki-clad, red-checchiaed Moroccan tirailleurs, exceed- 
ingly exotic-appearing, sitting on their accoutrement or 
leaning against the bare scaffolding of a new addition 
to the station. There came into my mind what an 
unwed friend told me of a conversation with a dying 
tirailleur, to whom she was giving a tisane in a long, 
dim, hospital room at two o'clock in the morning. He 
looked at her and said suddenly in his strange French: 
"Woman, I know thy look; thou and many like thee 
have not been embraced in love. In my village thou 
wouldst be a grandmother" (I had never thought of 
her as old, but the tirailleur knew that, as the men 
of his race rated women, she was old — old, and no one 
would have followed her to the well.) He continued: 
' 'If no man is to enfold thee, why not be as those of the 
great white coifs, who have given themselves to Allah? 
They have not thy look." Then he went into delirium 
and cried out in his own tongue and picked at his sheet, 
and when she came that way again he was dead. 

6 p.m., Vesoul Station. — ^Writing by the light that 
comes in from the gas-jet. Dim American forms silhou- 
etted in the great station. Partake of the loneHness 
that possesses the soul of American youth in France 
on a foggy autumn night. One of them said to me to- 
day, with a curious, dtilled look in his eye, a brooding, 
neurasthenic eye, "I'm the kind that gets killed the last 
day of the war." 

Then a presence apparent only by the light of his 
cigarette, a being with an accent not immediately place- 

9 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

able, half cockney, half Middle-West, calls out, "Say, 
does anybody know when we pull into Belfort?" 

It had, all the same, something of confidence-inspiring, 
so I briskly chirped up: 

"Oh, in an hour or two or three." 
"Well, I took the eight-o'clock train from Paris last 
night." 

Chorus: "You mean this morning?" 
"I mean last night, and going ever since." 
"What have you been doing in between times?" 
"Going, going," he answered, casually, "and as you 
see, going still!" 

"How did you manage to get on this train?" 
' * I don't know. There I was and here I am, and God 
knows where my kit is. I'm a flier, and I've got to have 
my things," he ended, rather irritably, and then there 
was another conversation about "burning the Rhine." 

After interminable hours — two of them — we came to 
Lure, and everybody seemed to be getting out, even the 
woman in purple, and there was a fumbling with pocket- 
lamps and the voice of my country crying, "Where's 

that d door, anyivay?" 

The young man who started last night came into my 
compartment as the train jerked out of the station, and 
he was a Canadian aviator en route for the big camp of 
the Royal Independent Air Corps at Chatenoir. Before 
the war he had been a chartered accountant. "But," 
he said, ' ' once in the air, never again can I sit at a desk, 
crushed in by four walls." And he told stories of hair- 
breadth escapes of himself and his comrades, and of 
combats in the air — once he had had his knee broken — 
and then he suddenly cried out in a sharp voice : ' ' God ! 
I'm tired! Somebody let me know if we ever get there," 
and flung himself in a corner, and went to sleep, I hope. 
A young American officer standing smoking in the 
corridor, with whom I had sat at lunch, turned on his 

10 



THE JOURNEY THERE 

pocket-lamp for an instant during the ensuing silence, 
and said, "Do you mind if I come in?" Then, in the 
pitch darkness, lighting one cigarette from the other, 
and very lonely, I think, he ahnost immediately began 
to talk about himself, and his story might be called the 
story of the yoimg man who was and wasn't married. 

Stripped of non-essentials, it was this: He had be- 
come engaged at a "co-ed." school, as he called it, some 
years before, and when he was drafted, in the possible 
event of his being ordered abroad, the twain decided 
to get married instead of waiting a few more years. 
One Sunday morning in November they hunted up a 
clergyman and the knot was tied. They then had lunch 
at the station and she took her train and he went back 
to his camp. She was an army nurse and he was in the 
Engineers. 

Now, as inclination alone could have caused them to 
unite (there wasn't the ghost of another reason apparent; 
they hadn't even mentioned the matter to their families), 
the sequel of the story becomes somewhat interesting; 
in fact, quite incomprehensible, let us say, to the Latin; 
even I myself was a bit muddled as to the whereforeness 
of it all. 

Well, to continue. The next time they meet is when 
Fate, not quite immindful of them, sends him as in- 
structor to a camp in the Middle West on the outskirts 
of the very town where her people Uve, and she goes to 
spend a three days' leave with them. 

The not-too-eager and certainly not-over-inventive 
bridegroom (whatever combinations may have been 
in his mind, neither he nor history records) gets a few 
hours' leave and goes to spend Simday at the home of 
his bride. 

I begin to breathe. But not at all. Her people, 
innocent as the new moon of the marriage, ask a few 
neighbors in for lunch — to make it pleasant for them. 

2 II 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

The bride was to return that very same afternoon to her 
hospital. They did walk to the station (under the same 
umbrella, I hope) and there they said good-by. 

"It was what you might call a quiet wedding," I 
hazarded at this stage, and it was too dark to see if he 
caught the point. Please bear in mind that this was a 
marriage of inclination; no other explanation, I repeat, 
being possible. And the luncheon took place the end 
of January. 

The next time the situation seems about to clear up 
is in the golden month of August, she having been 
transferred to the military hospital near the camp to 
which he, in the meantime, had been transferred as 
instructor. It seemed providential and again I breathe, 
thinking, "Love will find a way." Not at all. The bride 
rings him up the Sabbath morning after his arrival 
(Sunday is evidently a bad day for that young man) 
and tells him her orders take her to Camp SHI that night. 
The next day he gets orders to report for overseas duty, 
and here we sit in the dark, on the outskirts of Belfort! 
He breaks the silence later, with a certain eagerness in 
his voice (not, however, for his distant bride, who, I 
also gather, still bears her maiden name) : " I do hope if 
we beat them I get a chance to go into Germany with 
the troops. I've wandered all my life [he's between 
twenty-five and thirty] and sometimes I wonder how 
I'll take to Uving in one place and bringing up a family." 

In the dark I wondered, too. 

Later, much later. — To-morrow, All Saints' Day, there 
will be some crowding of the heavens, and the day 
after, the Feast of the Dead, all France will be a-hurry- 
ing to her graves. 



II 

ALL saints' day, NOVEMBER, IQiS 

EVENING. — Masevaux, a town of old fountains and 
old inns with charming old signs hanging out, the 
pebbly Doller running through it under ancient, bal- 
conied houses, and over all hanging faint odors of its 
century-old tanneries. A long day, but not too long. 

Punctually at eight-thirty I had descended the flashy 
stain\^ay of the "Tonneau d'Or" at Belfort to find the 
officer sent to meet me finishing his coffee and reading 
the morning papers, always comforting these days. 

In a thin fog, we start out of town, passing under the 
antique high wall of the castle against the rock of which 
"The Lion" has been carved. Now all has been done 
that it is humanly possible to do with granite and a 
Hon, but of that more another time — perhaps. I can't 
stop now except to say that the hand that fashioned it 
fashioned also the Statue of Liberty in New York 
harbor. 

We meet, just out of Belfort, a funeral procession — 
three coffins, two draped with the Tricolor, one with 
the Stars and Stripes. Making the sign of the cross, I 
commended three souls to Heaven. I always remember, 
accompanying a beloved one of my blood to his narrow 
dwelling, how sweet, how very sweet, it was to see the 
gesture of that sign, and the lifted hats of those we met, 
saluting him on his last journey. Though I do not care 
inordinately how or when or where I lose my flesh, that 
much I would like done to me — ^in passing. 

13 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

Nestled in the corner of a broad, sloping field was a 
cemetery,, a new cemetery, with French and American 
flags flying from its crowded graves, and many men were 
busy digging, and we heard the crunch of shovels in 
cold, gravelly earth as we passed, and yet I thought how 
well, how very well, the soldier sleeps ! . . . 

We were on the flat road that leads to Cernay, where 
the Germans have lain intrenched since the beginning 
of the war. 

Shifting masses of horizon-blue, velvety in the thin 
mist, appear, disappear down white roads, between fields 
of barbed wire and against horizons of rusty beeches. 
In the villages black-robed women and children and old 
men are coming out of rose-colored churches or stand- 
ing by elaborate, very decorative rose-colored fountains. 
There is the distant sound of cannon. It is again the 
front. 

At Masevaux, I find myself drawing up under some 
yellowing lindens in front of the building of the Mili- 
tary Mission — once the German Kommandantur, in turn 
once the nave of the old church of the Abbey of Mase- 
vaux. I walk over a rich carpet of rustling leaves to 
the door, and am shown up the broad, stone stairway 
of an immaculately kept building. 

Commandant Poulet having been called that morning 
to St.-Amarin, I am taken into a charming corner room 
hung with a wall-paper that might have been designed 
by Hansi, where a young, light-haired man with dark 
rings under his eyes, who knows both battles and desks, 
was sitting at a big table. 

We looked at each other, I must confess, with some 
curiosity, though of the politest. I, to see what the 
MiHtary Mission might be going to offer, but prepared 
to be very easily and very much pleased, he, doubtless, 
to see what had been "wished on" them for the next 
week. It might so easily have been awful, instead of 

14 




THE FOURTH OF JULY, I918, IN ALSACE 




PLACE DU MARCHE, MASEVAUX, JULY 1 4, I918 



[See page 24 



ALL SAINTS' DAY 

a niceish lady who has both wept and laughed, and known 
many lands and many men. He asks me what I would 
Hke to do that morning. Not having the ghost of an 
idea what there is to do, I answer, "Everything is in- 
teresting," and give a somewhat free Gallicization of 
"beauty Heth in the eye of the beholder." This was re- 
ceived approvingly, even hopefully, and he tells me that 
in the afternoon I am to attend a ceremony in the 
military cemetery at Moosch, in another valley. 

About this time I begin to remember that it is "La 
Toussaint," and I say that if possible I should like to 
go to church. This, too, is encouragingly easy and I am 
turned over to an officer whose wife and two children 
have been in Brussels for foiir years, he himself a de- 
serter from the German army. 

When we reached the church, built of gris rose, 
evidently and happily, from its abundance, the building 
stone of this colorful corner of the world, and which can 
take on the loveliest of patines in even a generation or 
two, I find it overflowing with the faithful, many blue 
men standing on its pink steps. The cure, followed, I 
hope, by his flock, was off on a longish sermon, and for 
a good half -hour I was washed and blown about on a 
sea of mixed metaphor, though it did not seem too long, 
for mind and imagination were flinging themselves about 
reconquered lands and border peoples, and I only really 
"came to," so to speak, when a great and splendid 
organ sounded and a deep, harmonious choir of men's 
voices joined it. Then I knew I was indeed on the 
frontier, where music hngers, and amorously it wotdd 
seem, near the last of the mad. Romantic peoples. 

When we passed out there was the noise of guns and 
everybody was looking up at Httle white balls of shrapnel 
unrolling themselves about some black specks in the blue, 
blue sky. It was the familiar firing on German airplanes. 

Then I was led to this charming old house, which is 

IS 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

one of six placed at right angles, on two sides of the 
Place du Chapitre. It proved to be part of the old 
convent, done over by Kleber when he cultivated the 
arts of peace rather than those of war. It belongs to 
four agreeable sisters, the Demoiselles Braun, whose 
brother, also a deserter from the German ranks, was 
killed in Champagne. They were rehanging the por- 
traits of their ancestors.^ Whereby hangs the tale of 
two American nurses who, quartered there some weeks 
before, had left the water running in the tub one night, 
after which the drawing-room ceiUng fell in and the paper 
peeled in hall and vestibule. Hence the rehanging of the 
ancestors, at their own, I mean the sisters', expense. 

They take me up a beautiful, but very worn, stairway, 
with a time-polished oaken balustrade, and I find myself in 
a paneled room, looking out on the square shaped Hke this : 



MeKY 



a 



"^^a 



%. 



-J I r 



TowABOiWE RciJCELSrBli 



OrouKTAIH 



n 
oaoo 

OOOO Q 



ADMi>llSrp.ATlorJ Of 

A^lClE^JrC^^OlR,of 

ABBE/ I^O*! TRlliONAl— 



T&Cfi. H005E* - 
OfThE 

CmaHoj>1£«e3 



o 

o 





■pU£E IX) CHAPfTRE 



o 



MAl^Ofi 
"BRAOK 

V. BENTHO ^ 



o 



pAi-ifACiE: 
To THE 



MAl*6Nf LAOTH 

oticB House" Of- 
The AT>7>ei>> 



G^' 



p:V)^ 



^'^ 



1 Note. — As far back as the end of the sixteenth century, there is, in 
the annals of Masevaux, mention of the tanneries of the Braun family. 

i6 



ALL SAINTS' DAY 

Many motors are drawn up in front of the Mission 
under the yellowing lindens. The old red inn of "Les 
Lions d'Or" is directly opposite, and on the left of the 
square at right angles with me are the four other houses 
once dwelt in by the chanoinesses when it was decided 
that each should have her own establishment. The 
square is roughly, anciently paved, with grass growing 
in between the cobblestones, and Mademoiselle Braun, 
who showed me to my room, told me the steps of the 
old stairway were so uneven because after the Revolu- 
tion (during which the Chapter had been dispersed) 
the house was long used as a school and they had been 
worn by generations of young feet running up and down. 

At 12.15 — I am conveyed to la popoU,^ for luncheon. 
More officers inspect me — I them also — and then we 
proceed to the consiiming of an excellent meal, to the 
very exhilarating accompaniment of the news of the 
capitulation of Turkey, and a Ught, easy touching on 
other prospective and pleasant changes. 

Now as, owing to circumstances too long to enter 
into, I hadn't eaten since noon the day before, passing 
by Chaumont, I did full justice to a rabbit white as 
snow, garnished with noodles of the same hue, flooded 
by a deHcious golden sauce. I only fleetingly remembered 
that I ordinarily avoid the Httle beast as food; for des- 
sert we had a great cake filled with chocolate and 
whipped cream, such a one as I had not seen for many a 
month and year. A bottle of champagne was opened in 
joy at the Turkish news. And we drank to everything 
and to everybody — even to the health of the "Sick 
Man of Europe," not, however, sicker than several 
others at that moment, as some one cheerfully added. 
It was all very pleasant, and I felt that everything was 
for the best in the best of war worlds. 

At 2.30 I start out with Captain Tirman over a 

I Officers' mess. 

17 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

smooth road, camoufl^, kilometer after kilometer, with 
screens of wire netting interwoven with broom and 
pine branches, for the road runs along the side of hills 
which slope down to the valley where the Germans 
lie intrenched. Everywhere are shell-holes, new and 
old. We stopped on a high place and, getting out, 
peered through a hole in the screen. Spread out before 
my eyes was the rich plain of Alsace, one of the world's 
gardens. Something crystal and shimmering half veiled 
its loveHness, but its beauty and richness I knew for 
the beauty and the richness of a thousand years of blood, 
and many men had found it fair and panted for its 
beauty and died for it. 

In the distance, very white and shining, were the 
chimneys of Mulhouse, and a pale-blue line against the 
horizon was the Black Forest. All the time there was 
the sound of cannon, ours and theirs, reverberating 
through the hills. I was greatly moved, and started 
to go higher up in the field, but Captain Tirman stopped 
me, saying: "It will be better for you to get away 
with your souvenirs than to take them unrecorded with 
you to the grave. The Boches shell anything they see; 
and we haven't got our masks, either, in case they send 
a gas-bomb." 

The roadsides were planted with cherry trees, scarlet- 
leaved, the kirschbaum of Alsace. The hills had 
great patches of velvety, rust-colored beeches; dark 
pines traced black patterns through them, yellow larches 
shone here and there like torches; a soft sun was dis- 
persing the last of the delicate, noonday mists. 

Then we slipped into the valley of the Thur, where 
lies the ancient town of Thann. From afar I saw the 
lacy, gray belfry of its cathedral, pressed against other 
heights of velvet rust and burnished gold. Nearby, 
the hill of the Engelburg, with its broken, overturned 
tower like a great ring, a souvenir of Turenne's campaign 

i8 



ALL SAINTS* DAY 

during the Thirty Years' War, was soft and lovely, too. 
The long street was sun-bathed, and filled with the 
black-bowed peasants of story-books, and the blue sol- 
diery of the great war. I wanted to stop by a pink 
fountain, near the richly carved portal of the cathedral, 
but we feared to be late for the ceremony at Moosch 
and hurried on. 

At a place called Bitschwiller, however, we were 
obhged to wait while an almost endless procession of 
black-clad old men, women, and children, and blue- 
clad soldiers wound across the road, from its pink 
church to the distant green and yellow cemetery. 

Furthermore, the Fifteenth New York Infantry — 
black, black, black — is quartered at Bitschwiller, and 
the most exotic sight I have ever seen were those khaki- 
clad negroes in that valley, already very high-colored. 

Suddenly against the steep hill, like a picture slightly 
tilted back, we came in sight of the square cemetery of 
Moosch. 

Above and below it was framed by a line of helmeted 
men in khaki, and as we neared I saw they were our 
black troops; the horizon-blue of a French infantry 
regiment made the frame at the two sides. High, high 
up were a group of white- and black-gowned priests, 
and red- and white-gowned acolytes swinging their 
censers. At the top of the steep stairway, running down 
the middle of the black-crossed cemetery, was a sacer- 
dotal figure, with outstretched arms, exhorting, and 
around about the whole were groups of women and 
children. We left the motor and walked over to the 
cemetery, where I found myself standing near the 
resting-place of Norman Hall, the first American to 
die in Alsace. From the tall, black cross floats the 
Stars and Stripes, and some one had planted chrysan- 
themums thick on his grave. Peace to him. He lies 
not far from General Serret, who fell, too, on the nearby 

19 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

sacrificial Hartmannswillerkopf, where commingled lie 
fifty thousand who at the word of command had put 
out each other's light. 

After the sermon the negro band of the Fifteenth 
played some grave and measured music, the French in- 
fantry band then something a Uttle too gay. As one of 
the officers said afterward, ''Cela a presque jris^ la polka.' ^ 

Then the "Marseillaise" sounded and "The Star- 
spangled Banner." I felt my veil wet against my eyes 
and my hps atremble as I thought, a second time that 
day, how well, how very well, the soldier sleeps. 

Above the cemetery in a higher contour of eternal hill 
was a great patch of yellow and black and rust-colored 
forest against a clear blue-white sky, in which tiny 
black specks were moving eastward. 

We waited to watch the negro troops defile. They 
appeared very smartly dressed till the eye got to their 
feet, and such a collection of ripped, torn, cut, down- 
at-the-heel footgear was never seen! They seem to be 
a flat-footed race, too. I spoke to a couple of darkies 
very much en repos, who were leaning against a fence, 
near the motor, as I got in. 

One answered, with a broad grin, "You an American 
from America?" 

"Yes." 

"Well, have you heard dis here war's about over?" 
The coalest-black one then contributes this to the con- 
versation : 

"When peace is signed dis here nigger starts to walk 
home." 

"What about the ocean?" 

"I'll take a swim, lady; the water can't be no colder 
and no damper dan dis here 'Alice' land." 

The mulatto by his side said, "I subscribes," and 
became a pale gray at the bare idea of getting colder or 
damper. 

20 



ALL SAINTS' DAY 

Then we see Commandant Poulet, tall, blue-clad, with 
high decorations ashine, coming toward us, and he and 
many officers are presented to me, after which I change 
into his motor, and we start out over a magnificent 
military road built since the war. It was begun and 
completed almost miraculously, it would seem, in Uttle 
more than a year, and over it, safely hidden from German 
gims, come and go the great military suppHes of the 
Alsatian front — troops, artillery, munitions, food, am- 
bulances. 

As we mount, mysterious, dissolving twilight views 
present themselves near red cherry trees, burn against 
distant blue hills, yellow larches illuminate other "hill- 
tops hearsed with pines," and the beech woods are a 
deep, deep purple. Then we plunge into the dimness of 
the great cedar forests of the Route Joffre, talking, but 
not too much, in the large, enfolding twilight, of the 
war, and of Alsace of to-day. Commandant Poulet 
has been in charge of the Military Mission since Christ- 
mas Day of 1914, and I thought, rolling over the broad 
road, contemporaneous with his administration, how out 
of thousands, nay millions of men, his part during these 
war years had been to construct and not destroy. He 
told me that almost his first official act was to be present 
at the burial of Norman Hall on December 26, 191 5. 

As we issue from the dark forest we find ourselves 
on a crest overlooking many other twilit hills. There 
is a pale, pale yellow still burning in the west, and the 
most timid of evening stars shines above it. Then we 
dip into the deep blue valley where Masevaux lies. 

Peasants are hurrying to their villages, and there is 
a continuous, but dull, sound of cannon. In the chill 
of the fallen night we arrive at the Place du Chapitre, 
the town dark, dark as we enter it, and no light in any 
house. Having seen my pleasant room only in daytime, 
I proceeded in hunting for the light to try to turn on 

21 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

a barometer, then by another door feeling my way 
along, I fumbled about an arrangement of mandolin 
and pipe, then, as a last resort, I sought Hght from a 
stuffed owl. After which I went into the corridor and, 
re-entering the room, found the electric button just 
where it ought to be — by the door. 

A saving hour of soUtude before I am fetched for 
dinner, which was very pleasant, but I can't tell about 
it now, for sleep, dear sleep, is touching me, and it is 
two days and a night since it has been near. 



Ill ' 

FETE DES MORTS, NOVEMBER, I918 

CHURCH again, seemingly in company with the 
entire population, civil and military, after which 
I fian^d in the old streets of Masevaux, word having 
been brought that no motor was available for our 
projected trip to Dannemarie. Indeed, I had early 
noticed from my window much mounting in hot haste, 
accompanied by the lively sound of two kinds of firing. 
Some coup de main, I suppose. 

I strolled about under an uncertain sun, occasionally 
sensible of that delicate, not unpleasant smell of bark 
and leather hanging on a windless air. About me was 
that world of blue-clad soldiers, black-robed women, 
and many children were playing in the pink and gray 
streets; a group of little girls were skipping rope to the 
words ein, zwei, drei, quatre, cinq, six! 

The post-office of modern Teutonic origin still wears, 
high up and indifferently, the Double Eagle, though 
the more accessible Kaiserliches Post-Amt has been re- 
moved. A little farther down the street is the old inn 
of the "Golden Eagle" whose historic sign dates from 
Napoleonic days, and which, as was pointed out to me, 
turns its golden back disdainfully to the black, double 
face of the once proud eagle of the post-office. 

And this inn of the "Golden Eagle" hangs its charming 
sign out on a comer of the square called "La Halle aux 
Bles" (the Grain Market), surroimded by sloping- 
roofed, roomy houses. In the center is a rose-colored 

23 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

fountain, with three diminishing rose-shaped basins 
around a carved central column. 

And the cobblestoned square with its good fountain 
and its comfortable houses — there's even a stable and 
a garage on one side — has something cozy about it, 
its atmosphere that of a place long used by human 
beings for the homeHke customs of "the simple life," 
which last bears no resemblance to that occasionally 
practised at great expense and inconvenience by those 
who "need a change" and can afford one. 

American troops passed through the Halle aux Bles 
on the 30th of May of this year, again on the 4th of July, 
and on the 14th, too, always drawing themselves up 
at last in the Place du Marche, one end of which is my 
Place du Chapitre. There, under the lindens. General 
Hahn and General Boissoudy watched them deploy, 
while gaily attired Alsatian girls grouped about the 
fountain acclaimed them, and from every window hung 
the Stars and Stripes. 

Then I found myself wandering out on the road to 
Belfort, past the high, grassy eminence known as the 
"Ringelstein," once crowned by the proud castle of 
Duke Mason, founder of Masevaux. Traces of ancient 
walls embowered in ivy are still to be seen, and at its 
base are many old outbuildings of the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries, once dependencies of the Abbey 
and the Chapter, and when you are not expecting it 
you find old inscriptions and bits of carving plastered 
into them. On one high-roofed outhouse was a large 
crown and three fleurs-de-lis. Blasted through one end 
of the great rock of the Ringelstein runs the railway. 
And there is a near view of the red and green and yellow 
roofs of the houses of the chanoinesses confounding them- 
selves with the autumn foliage of the trees which em- 
bower them. 

I begin to know a little of the early history of Mase- 

24 



f£te des morts 

vaux, enveloped in legends and many contrary tales — 
Masevaux, ruled now by abbots, now by feudal lords, 
belonging sometimes to the House of Austria, sometimes 
to the House of France. 

And the first legend is that of its foundation. How 
the lord of the country, by name Mason, a nephew of 
Saint -Odile, was feasting in his castle of this same 
Ringelstein, and the wines of Burgundy and Alsace and 
of the Rhine were flowing, and a troubadour was re- 
citing a tale of war and love, when suddenly Duke Mason 
cries out : 

"Soul of my soul, misfortune is happening to my son! 
Night is falling. Where is he?" And he goes to the 
window and looks out. Some one answers: 

"Fear not, illustrious father of so dear a child. He 
has doubtless tarried with the holy fathers of Moutiers." 
But the night gets blacker, the lords and ladies drop 
their golden hanaps and the troubadour is still. 

Then Mason, in the grip of deeper presentiment, 
cries out, "Who loves me to the succor of my son!" 
And they seek with torches for the child. Alas! the 
white body of Mason's son, born of a dead, beloved wife, 
is found floating upon the little stream, and Mason, 
pressing what was once his child to his heart, cries out: 
"Nothing can ever give me joy again. I will build a 
monastery wherein to pass my days until God calls me 
from this heavy world." And that is the origin of 
Masevaux — Masmunster. The legend has it, too, that 
on moonless nights the child returns, weeping, because 
he did not live long enough to read all the beautiful 
stories inscribed by the gods, the prophets and the 
wise, concerning the sons of men. And as I looked up 
at the great grass- and vine-covered rock whereon the 
castle of Mason once rose, the Doller flowing at its base, 
the cannon of the great war sounded. Down the white 
road was disappearing a battalion of blue-clad men, 

25 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

going toward the black and rust and yellow of the hills 
— a red cherry tree between me and them. Then I turned 
back into the town and hied me to the popote, where 
some half-dozen extremely agreeable men were awaiting 
me, as well as a sustaining repast. 

The American communique was immediately and very 
appreciatively read out. Our victorious advance was 
continuing along the Meuse (known as the "Muse" by 
the doughboy), the First American Army attacking on 
the west bank in liaison with the Fourth French Army 
on the left. Then we looked over the Turkish armistice 
terms, quite satisfjdngly comprehensive from the open- 
ing of the Dardanelles to promises on the part of the 
Turks not to speak to any of their former friends. 

And we talked of how from the terrace of Versailles, 
where the German Empire was proclaimed, the states- 
men of the world will watch the twilight descending 
upon Walhalla and its gods; and here in Alsace the crash 
of falling temples can be heard. 

After lunch I went with Lieutenant Lavallee to see a 
bit of Alsace from within, for he was to invite various 
mayors of villages to go to Paris for the "Fetes Alsaci- 
ennes," to be held the middle of November, and also to 
select a discreet number of veterans of 1870 and school- 
children of 1918 to accompany them. 

We went first to Gewenheim, a somewhat war-battered 
village and, as we entered it, Lavallee pointed out the 
iron plate on the sign-post, indicating the name of the 
village and the department. Like many others of the 
Haut Rhin (Upper Rhine), after 1870 it had been quite 
simply turned and marked in German. This proved 
most convenient and economical, for all the French 
MiHtary Mission had to do when they came to Alsace 
in 1914 was to turn them back as they had been before 
1870! 

The mayor's house, one of the usual dwellings with a 

26 



FETE DES MORTS 

small door for humans and a big door for harvests, had 
been much damaged. Passing in through a sagging en- 
trance, we found the mayor, the classic, horny-fisted, 
wrinkle - faced mayor of a village, with cobwebs and 
straw and other substances adhering to his coat, but 
possessed of a certain air of dignity and authority not- 
withstanding. There was a moment's silence after the 
lieutenant gave him the invitation, pride visibly wres- 
thng with parsimony, accompanied by the working up 
and down of a very prominent Adam's apple. He ac- 
cepted finally with a sort of "I am a man" expression, 
but there was a quite apparent melting of his being when 
he found that it was the State that would defray expenses. 
Then the wife of his bosom, who had helped him make 
and save his money, came in and showed us some of 
their "best" shell-holes, and a statue of the Virgin of 
Lourdes under a large glass bell which had not a scratch, 
even, though everything around had been shattered. 

There was also a lithograph of Henner's red-headed 
"Alsatian Girl," who hangs in every home and every 
railway station, and is used for loans and appeals and 
calendars and advertisements of complexion washes and 
hair-dyes; and she was once a charming creature, before 
familiarity bred contempt. 

The worthy couple then fell to a discussion in Alsatian 
German as to which of the veterans would be possible 
candidates for the trip to Paris. There seemed to be 
something the matter with every one mentioned. Rud- 
ler, Franzi, was nice and it was a pity that his rheuma- 
tism prevented his getting about, as he had lost his 
dung-heap, though not his house, in a recent bombard- 
ment and needed distraction. It wasn't quite clear to 
me how you could lose a possession of that kind, but I 
wasn't at the front to ask questions, so I let it pass. 

Handrupp, Hansi's, eyes were giving him trouble. If 
he went, a boy would have to go to lead him about, 
3 27 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

and, even so, would he be welcome in Paris if it were 
known that his daughter, old enough to know better, had 
run away with a German? 

First names, it will be noticed, came last, and last 
names first, a relic of German order. Another incau- 
tious but evidently esteemed veteran, by name Bauer, 
Seppi, had fallen from a hayrick last summer and would 
never walk again. It was like looking at the back of 
the web of Fate, and I found myself wondering with 
somewhat of exasperation, "for this had a hero's death 
at Gravelotte or Villersexel or Saint-Privat been denied 
him, where angels would have awaited his strong, young 
body to take it to the heaven of those who die for 
country?" Suddenly the dulce et decora of so dying was 
quite clear to me, and Bauer, Seppi, who fell from the 
hayrick last summer, and all his still extant contempo- 
raries, had the tragic part — as would these men of the 
great war some forty or fifty years hence, who were now 
going about with an astonished yet proud consciousness 
that, ex milUbus, they had been chosen and been spared. 

But as Lavallee very justly remarked, "What would 
happen to the world if everybody died young?" I sup- 
pose he is right, and I bethought myself that there are 
those who must await threescore and ten before the 
reasons for their having been born are apparent; the 
"Tiger," for instance, and Moses, and many others. 

We then visited the cure, living at the very end of the 
village toward the lines. He was called from the church 
where he was hearing confessions, and Lavallee proceeded 
to ask him which of the schoolboys he recommended; 
wideawake ones, without, of course, being obstreperous, 
were wanted. Something, disappearing almost as swiftly 
as it came, passed over the cure's face. It was a look of 
sudden, nearly overwhelming desire to go himself, and 
the immediate realization of the impossibility of that 
or anything else that meant change. 

28 



f£te des morts 

On the round center-table was a book, Deo Ignoto, 
and UEcho de Paris. A little harmonium with manu- 
script-music on its rack was near the bed; on the walls 
were shiny lithographs of three popes, and an illumi- 
nated Lord's Prayer in German. As the upper rooms of 
the house were "unhealthy," on account of the raids 
and bombardments, the cur6 lived and breathed and 
had his being downstairs in this one room, with a rather 
boisterous yellow dog that kept sniffing at my gaiters. 
He was a large man, with a naturally masterful eye, 
who w^ould have been at home in many places, occupied 
with many things, but he had Uved, and would die, 
Cure of Gewenheim. And he at least owed the Germans 
a temporary widening of his activities, for Gewenheim 
is but three kilometers from the firing-line. 

Ihen we crossed the muddy street to the schoolhouse 
to confer with the nuns concerning little girls, and were 
greeted by a dark-eyed, sparkHng-faced Sister, very 
gifted by nature, who would have graced any drawing- 
room. There was something of elegance even in the way 
she had the washing of the stairs cease to allow us to 
pass up, and in the way she removed piles of coarse 
linen from the chairs in the room to which she conducted 
us. Then another Sister, not so bright, though she 
evidently ranked the gifted one, came in, and together 
they pondered the names of possible little girls. I had 
a feeling of being behind the scenes, and recognized how 
orderly and reasonable is the working of a so-often 
fortuitously appearing Fate, as they decided who should, 
or should not, take the journey to Paris. I thought, 
too, that it would have been well-nigh intolerable to me, 
had I been a little girl in Gewenheim, not to be among 
those chosen to go. But there was no longing on either 
of their faces. Especially the charming one radiated 
happiness and content. And how true that nothing 
can enter the heart that is not already there ! I wondered 

29 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

if I, to whom so much of life is known — its glories and 
its miseries — possessed what that graceful woman had 
found in the dullest routine of duty imaginable. She 
knew whither she was bound, also whence she had come. 
In comparison, shaking, shifting, uneasy, appeared the 
compass of my life. . . . 

A bottle of quite sour white wine was produced and they 
watched Lavallee and myself drink; no escape possible. 

They are of the Sisters of the Divine Providence with 
their mother-house at Ribeauville, who have taught in 
the schools of Alsace for generations. 

After leaving them, we visited the inn, entering into 
the Gastzimmer through a tiny antechamber of a 
shop, where thread and candles and oil for lamps, socks, 
and a few other strict essentials were sold. The black- 
toothed, thin-haired landlady, Tritter by name, might 
have been of any age, but a handsome boy of fifteen 
or thereabouts, with a bad cough, calling her "Mother," 
gave a possible limit. A good-looking, high-complexioned 
girl appeared breathless from a bethumbed back door, 
arranging two little curls under her ears. After the 
greetings, Lieutenant Lavallee said: 

"Have you had any news of your daughter Odile?" 

"Not since last winter from Colmar," both mother 
and sister answer; "the parcels we sent her, they cost each 
fifteen francs, have not been received. She was hungry 
when she wrote." 

Then was poured out a confused story concerning the 
capture of a squad of Germans with their gun, in the 
autumn of 19 14. A few days after the event the sisters 
had been standing in the street in front of their door, 
when a German officer came up and said to Odile, the 
younger : 

"You are wanted for a moment." She followed him 
to another officer on horseback, waiting in a field. They 
had not seen her since. Then it appeared that it was the 

30 



FETE DES MORTS 

baker's wife who through jealousy had denounced the 
pretty Odile (the r61e of the baker himself was not indi- 
cated), but such an expression of hatred for the baker's 
vAie, rather than for the Germans, came over the mother's 
visage that I was reminded of faces in pre-Raphaelite 
pictures — I mean those on the goat side in Judgment Day 
scenes. It was evidently one of those obscure yet ruthless 
village tragedies set in the frame of equally ruthless war. 

When we came out we copied an old inscription over 
the house door of a man, Louis Vogler by name, who, re- 
turning from a campaign, had been decorated with the 
Legion of Honor in 1816, and had recorded the fact for 
all time over his door, his decoration even being carved 
in with the rest. 

Evidently a man who, having done a deed, was not 
content that it should be writ only in water (or blood), 
but had it put squarely and clearly over the door of the 
house to which he returned; and was he not justified? 
For here it is being recorded some hundred years after, 
instead of having been carried away on the great river 
of Napoleonic deeds. 

Then, through several wet villages, groups of girls 
with their felt slippers stuck into their clacking wooden 
sabots (very comfortable footgear, it appears) pass 
groups of blue-clad soldiers, and words are exchanged. 
I couldn't hear, but by the looks accompanying them and 
the giggles I judged them to be the eternal words ex- 
changed in all ages between soldiers and future mothers of 
the race. And there is a verse, old as the army, which runs : 

Le negligent troupier 
Qui laisse passer I'heure 
Et trap longtemps demeure 
Sera puni par son sous-officier} 

* And the forgetful trooper 
Who lets the hour pass 
And dallies too long, alas! 
Will be punished by his under-oflBcer. 
31 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

Everjrwhere along the road, through the mist, detach- 
ments of blue-clad men would appear and disappear. 
I thought with a touch of sadness, an esthetic sadness, 
to be sure, that this extreme beauty of dissolving dis- 
tances would be lost when the world of blue-clad men 
would have disappeared, replaced by men in shabby, 
nondescript, civilian clothes, or by des types d melon on d 
tube — those wearing derby hats or cyHnders. 

Near Rodern, between some lines of poplars, a hel- 
meted cavalryman, with his detachment, rode by on a 
great black horse. He was bending sUghtly forward, 
his lance in his hand, his eyes looking straight ahead, his 
ample, light-blue tunic almost concealing his saddle. 
He was a pure French type, pale of face, with black 
hair, black mustache, slanting nose, and I knew him for 
the archetypal Gallic warrior as he has appeared 
through the ages, making epics for France. 

At Bourbach-le-Haut, Lieutenant Lavallee was to in- 
vite a last mayor to partake of the trip to Paris, and hunt 
up some remaining veterans. Whatever gentle thirst 
I had had for mayors and veterans being now quite 
slaked, I went to the Uttle church, instead of to the 
Mairie. Through the half-open door came light and 
chanting sounds. I went in to find a dim interior, with 
an ancient arch framing the altar space, in front of which 
was a narrow, black coffin. Only some very old bit of 
mortality, waxy and shrunken, could lie within. Women, 
children, and what may have been veterans were saying 
the rosary in German — the Sorrowful Mysteries — and I 
thought on my dead, and on that dear and holy brother 
bom into the world on this day long years ago. In 
Alsace he had desired and received, dreaming and adoles- 
cent, the baptismal waters. 

Sadness invaded me, even as the dreary night was in- 
vading the day, and I would have groaned aloud, but I 
saw Lieutenant Lavallee standing by me. Haunted by 

32 



f£te des morts 

the mournful chanting, with its mysterious indications, 
"Jetz und in der Stunde unseres Absterbens, Amen,'* I 
passed out into falling night and rain; dark masses of 
mountain loomed up, Ughter spaces were the stretching 
vaUeys. Soon we found ourselves on the deep road to 
Masevaux, I loneher than the loneliest of the dark and 
hurrying clouds. 



IV 

THANN AND OLD THANN 

5UNDAY MORNING, November jt^.— Awakened at 
six by heavy firing. After wondering what could 
be happening, I remember that Hfe, as far as I am con- 
cerned, is for the moment largely joy, or rather joyous 
riding, with a series of agreeable French officers (they 
certainly are of an amiability!), in a series of large, 
powerful military motors, through a series of beautiful 
autumnal hills, over a series of the newest and most 
wonderful of war roads. 

Enough church-going, however, as will have been 
noticed, to keep me mindful that man, and woman, too, 
is grass, and though it, or rather she, springs up in the 
morning, she may be cut down by night, and that this 
bending of the hills is by the journeys of her eternity. 

Well, to get to the point, or rather to Thann. We 
started out early, at nine, for I was to find a Mass in the 
cathedral, after which we were to proceed to Vieux 
Thann, where war has not spared the church nor left 
worshipers. 

Again we took the screened road overhanging the 
valley. Again we stopped on an eminence and climbed 
into a field, and again I was shown the blue valley, over 
the tops of some red cherry trees. Nothing detached 
itself from gradations of velvety mists and beaming dis- 
tances, but I knew that on the grape-planted slopes of 
an unseen river that other wine of defeat was being 
drunk from cups held stiffly to unwilling lips. 

34 







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, 1 





THANN AND OLD THANN 

As we dipped down into the valley of the Thur, the 
belfry of the church of Thann appeared, so mistily, 
lacily soft that its form and substance seemed but as 
something breathed into the air, at any moment to be 
dissolved, against hills that were like brocaded stuffs, 
whose gold would be very thick if one turned them 
wrong side out. My heart was stirred because of the 
fairness of the Sabbath world. 

We drew up in front of the gorgeous portal of the 
cathedral, once a deep pink, but with time grown 
paler and softer at all its edges, and whose boardings 
and sandbags now partly hide the carved story of the 
life of Christ and His Mother. We grope our way in 
through several swinging doors, and find the high, 
Gothic space filled with a misty yellow light coming 
in through narrow windows, covered with oiled paper, 
the precious stained-glass having been long since re- 
moved. 

Little by little the forms of kneeling women and 
children, and many soldiers standing, detach themselves 
from the lovely gloom. The green vestment of the 
priest at the altar, on which are six tall, crystal, wide- 
branched candelabra, misty like the rest, is the only 
spot of color, for the splashes of horizon-blue become 
nearly white after a strange fashion of this color in dim 
light, whether of church or falling night. In the ancient 
wrought-iron pulpit the cure was just finishing a sermon 
in French, immediately beginning one in German. It 
appears that as the communique improve, the French 
sermon gets longer, and the German shorter, and merci- 
fully neither is long. 

We passed out quickly after the **Ite, missa est." 

I had been feeling that Captain B might be in a 

hurry, but when I looked about to see if he were fidget- 
ing, I found him doing what any miles gloriosus should 
be doing from time to time, saying his prayers. 

35 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

And this is the story of the building of the church 
of Thann, and of its arms, which bear a single pine tree. 

Death found the holy Bishop Theobald in the Umbrian 
Valley, and, knowing that his hour had come, he said to 
his servitor Maternus, who knelt weeping by his side: 

"Thou knowest I leave no worldly goods, for the 
poor have needed what I had. But this sapphire ring, 
dear memory of her once loved, take it, thou, that worms 
may not dwell within it." And then he entered into con- 
templation, saying nothing further of the things of earth. 

When Maternus had made ready to hide his master's 
body from the light, he tried to take the ring from its 
finger. But with the ring came the finger, and both 
were inclosed as in a shining rim. 

Maternus, greatly wondering, hid the precious relic 
in a hollow place in his staff and started back to Alsace, 
begging his bread along the way. After many delays, 
having been set upon by wicked men and molested by 
prowling animals, he finally arrived in the valley of the 
Thur. 

Exhausted, he laid himself down to rest, placing 
against a pine tree the precious staff. The next morning 
he was awakened by the ringing of the Angelus, and 
when he started to grasp his staff he found that it was 
as if grafted on to the great pine, while to left and right 
were burning two tall, pale, sapphire flames. 

At this moment the lord of the Engelburg came by, 
the ruins of whose great castle are those one sees rising 
above the town of Thann. He had perceived the two 
blue flames from afar and, hastening to find out what 
they signified, he recognized Maternus, faithful servitor 
of his friend Theobald. 

Maternus then related the death of the saint in the 
Umbrian plain, showing him the finger and the ring; 
whereupon the lord of the Engelburg, weeping and 
sighing, cried: 

36 



THANN AND OLD THANN 

"Oh! my precious friend Theobald; oh! my dearly 
loved sister Adelaide, this is thy betrothal ring, and 
these two sapphire flames announce thy union in dear 
heaven!" (In those days they were quick to see divine 
meanings.) 

Now, the so well-loved Adelaide, in her green youth, 
had been struck by a bolt from heaven, after which 
Theobald, for whom the whole round earth held nothing 
more of value, had consecrated himself to God. 

The lord of the Engelburg, his gaze fixed upon the 
luminous finger and the familiar blue ring, knew soon 
the too often hidden will of God, and cried out again: 

"Here I will build a church, and its reliquary shall 
contain this precious ring and finger." 

And so was built the church and monastery of Thann, 
and about them grew the town, and during long cen- 
turies on the vigil of the feast of Saint-Theobald, a freshly 
cut pine tree was placed in front of the cathedral, 
flanked by two great wax candles. Nor can any one, 
even of the very positive-minded, who look no farther 
than stones and mortar for all meanings, give a better 
reason for the arms of Thann. 

Then we motored on toward Vieux Thann, half de- 
stroyed, and evacuated since 19 14, but were obliged to 
leave the too visible motor on the outskirts of the village, 
creeping close along a very high screen of wire and broom 
branches that we might not be seen by the enemy. For 
we were in the plain of Cernay, now known as the 
Ochsenfeld, once called the "Field of Lies," where the 
three sons of Louis le Debonnaire routed their father's 
army. Lothair, Louis, and P6pin were their names. 
But of all this another time. 

Vieux Thann is a half-demolished, echoing, empty 
town, with a background of neglected vineyards on 
very close-pressing hills. 

Everywhere were signs of German war occupation. 

37 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

The schoolhouse had been their evacuation hospital, 
and one of the old inns bore the sign, "Verband-Station." 
The only Uving things in Vieux Thann were the foun- 
tains, quite lovely in the pink-stoned, gracious Alsatian 
way, with their gentle, unhurried streams of crystal 
water. It all reminded me vaguely of Pompeii, even in 
the misty light of a northern Indian summer sun. 

Above, in the perfect blue, the usual firing on German 
airplanes was going on. Long after the black specks 
had disappeared to the east the little, round, soft, 
compact balls of shrapnel were still slowly unfolding 
themselves. 

About fifteen hundred feet from us were the battle- 
lines, where the French and Germans have faced each 
other in the "Field of Lies" since 19 14. 

One of the battered inns, "Zum Goldenen Lamm," 
has its once lovely old sign still hanging out, but the 
golden lamb is gone, and only his golden feet and the 
green wreath of laurel that once entwined him remain. 

And to what winds had the dwellers of the great 
village been scattered? Where had they been received, 
unwillingly, by strangers, those hosts of refugees, fleeing 
from their homes, red with excitement, bright-eyed, 
voluble? I've seen them, too, after months of treading 
up another's stairs and eating of the salt bread of charity 
— pale, silent, dispirited, returning to villages like Vieux 
Thann, to see their all among disorderly piles of fallen 
stones and crumbling mortar. . . . 

Back to the living city, to an increasing sound of 
cannon, but the Sabbath stillness was so deep nothing 
seemed really to disturb it. 

The cathedral with its single, finely pointed tower 
was like a needle everywhere threading up long streets. 
I had a desire to see it empty, and as I entered, its per- 
fect proportions gave me a sweet and satisfying wel- 
come. The red lamp of the sanctuary was now the only 

38 



THANN AND OLD THANN 

spot of color in the thick yellow gloom, out of which 
line and proportion gradually detached themselves. 
The celebrated choir-stalls had been removed to Sewen, 
but above the altar of the Virgin is a Gothic triptych, 
and the beautiful pulpit is of fifteenth-century wrought- 
iron. We groped our way into a low, vaulted chapel 
which existed even before the church was built, passing 
a tombstone bearing the arms of the house of Ferrette, 
a family once all-powerful in these valleys. Over the 
altar of the chapel is an ancient statue of Saint-Theo- 
bald. He has a long, thin, shaven, upper-class face, 
his eyes are bent, and he is looking perhaps as he did 
shortly before death found him in the Umbrian Valley. 
It is the visage of a man having done with personal 
things, and a great pity is woven into the downward 
curves of the benignant face. 

We drove back to Masevaux, over one of the splendid 
new war roads, rising and dipping through forest- 
covered hills. The brilliant sun shone athwart each 
leaf, still dewy and sparkling, and a strong, rich, autum- 
nal smell exuded from the earth. It reminded Captain 
Bernard of hunting before the war, that carefree chasse 
d'avant- guerre, and I thought of Hungarian castles, and 
long days in forests, walking through rustling leaves, 
or sitting silently in glades with men in green-brown 
hunting garb, awaiting the game. In the evening, 
shining dinner-tables, and talk about the day's bag 
by men in pink hunting-coats and women wearing their 
best gowns and all their jewels. . . . And much that is 
no more. 

We descended at the popote as the hand of the church 
clock pointed to 12.15. Blue-clad officers were standing 
by the windows reading the Belfort morning paper just 
arrived, and the Paris newspapers of the day before, as 
I went in. 

The enemy is beating his retreat through the Argonne 

39 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

Forest, to the sound of the hour of destiny, and there 
are armistice and abdication rumors, and indications 
that they want to sauver les meuhles, or, as they would say, 
seeing they've got into a bad business, retten was zu 
retten ist — i.e., German unity, which, saved, means all 
is saved. But there are strange dissolvents infiltrating 
everywhere, scarcely any substance can resist, and the 
blood of peoples boiling over, and much good broth 
spilling, and too many cooks everywhere. For what 
man but wants to try his 'prentice hand at seasoning of 
the mess? And it was all talked about to the consuming 
of M^re Labonne's especially excellent Sunday dinner, 
an example of la vraie, la d^licieuse cuisine frangaise 
hourgeoise. There were -pieds de veau that melted in 
the mouth, and creamed potatoes, after which a very 
delicious hachis, with some sort of horseradish sauce, 
and when I remark that it has also a touch of garlic. 
Serin cries out, "But not at all — it's only horseradish." 
On my being supported by everybody at the table, 
he finally says, with an innocent but somewhat discom- 
fited smile, "It's true that there must be a lot for me 
to notice it." Then he tells with gusto of a repast in 
his dear Toulouse where there was a whole cold pheasant 
for each guest, and each pheasant was blanketed with 
such a thick cream of garHc that the bird itself could 
scarcely be seen. "It was exquisite," he added, "I 
dare say; one can even smell it here," some one cruelly 
finished. 

Then they spoke of how the French had supported 
captivity better than the English, and why. 

"We always talk while eating," said Bernard, "no 
matter how scanty or ignoble the repast. It's our hour 
for relaxation." (Any one lunching or dining at French 
officers' messes will have noticed this.) "But with the 
English it is different. They eat silently, and in cap- 
tivity they easily get the spleen and fall into melancholy, 

40 



THANN AND OLD THANN 

because the food isn't served as they would hke, or 
because they can't wash or shave or exercise." 

And I told the story of the brother of a French friend 
whom I had recently seen, just back from nearly four 
years' captivit3^ who returned in such a stout, rosy con- 
dition that his sister was ashamed to show him, and when 
asked about her pauvre frdre would blush. 

We sat long, talking now of books, now of personages, 
now of local happenings. Serin telling of passing that 
morning through one of the smaller villages where even 
the young girls had saluted him with a military salute 
as he rode by — and one of the officers said, with a flash, 
"Trks d^livr^es celles-W" {" Very delivered, those!") Then 
some one told the story of the man who came down to 
Masevaux to make a book on Alsace and, seeing the line 
of the trenches marked that day in blue on the com- 
mandant's map, remarked, in a d^gagi way, "Le Ehin, 
n'est-ce pas?" ("The Rhine, I suppose?") 

"Not yet," was the quiet answer. 

He then rushed them all oflf their feet for ten hours, 
after which, having got what he wanted, he went back 
to Paris and wrote his book. And from what I hear it 
wasn't a bad book, either. Though one of the officers 
said he knew he could do the same about Prague or 
Peking, that he'd never seen, with some books, a good 
pair of scissors and as much paste as he wanted. 

All is handled lightly, as only a group of Frenchmen 
could handle it, gUssant, n'appuyant jamais, each bring- 
ing his little gift of wit and culture, enjoying the im- 
personal with the same pleasure as the personal, in the 
French way. Of course, the communiques are as honey 
after four years of bitter herbs, very bitter, even though 
distilled in extinguishable hope. 

And I must say that to me lively and untrammeled 
conversation is the salt of daily life; and if, as it some- 
times happens, one's own thoughts are expanded, 

41 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

brightened, and returned to one, it is indeed delectable 
above all things, the true salt to be used in quantities 
(if you can get it). For, alas! the majority of people 
have no ideas, when you come down to it, or, having a 
few, they are pig-headed and look but into the con- 
verging point of the angle, knowing nothing of the 
splendor of diverging lines where self is swallowed up in 
unself. And there are the close-headed, whose minds 
work slowly in a cramped way, or not at all, and they 
are forever complaining that they only think of things 
to say when they get home and the lights are out. 
They might just as well not think of them (one some- 
times doubts if they really do) for all the good they are 
to their neighbors. And there are those very thin-skinned 
ones who immediately get contentious, and think the 
arrow is meant for them instead of the universe at large, 
and one could go on indefinitely through the Hst of im- 
penetrable heads, to whom the blow of an ax is as the 
brush of a feather, or cushiony heads that once dented, 
however, never regain their contours, and many, many 
others. These all need material sauces, good, rich sauces 
to their food, or they would find it tasteless, not having 
even a pinch of this other salt to season it with. And 
they are mostly those who do not work, but whose 
fathers worked — sometimes even their mothers — and 
oh, Id Id, the subject is endless, for everybody talks — 
even those who have nothing to say. 



V 

THE BALLON d'aLSACE 

5 UN DAY AFTERNOON— At two o'clock I started 
out with Captain Bernard and Captain Antoni 
for the great mountain known as the Ballon ^ d'Alsace, 
sometimes called, too, "the knot of Europe," in an 
especially high-powered motor (I never know the mark 
of any of them, distingiiishing a Ford from a Rolls- 
Royce only by the generally pampered feeling pervad- 
ing me when in the latter). 

The Ballon rises like a wall at the very end of the 
valley of the Doller, and we passed through many vil- 
lages, shining pinkly in the prismatic November after- 
noon, where there was much going into church for 
vespers, of blue- or black-clad figures. The thirteenth 
century-towered church of Sewen is on a sHght eminence 
in the heart of the village, and the cemetery around it 
was crowded with the faithful, regretting their dead, or 
some, perhaps, for one reason or another (What know 
I ?) , feeHng, ' ' 'Tis better they He there." ' * Live long, but 
not too long for others," is an excellent device. 

The charming lake of Sewen, though far from the 
village, seen from a certain angle, reflects the tower of 
the church and is, they told me, of Moorish origin. These 
valleys and hills seem everywhere like open books con- 
cerning the dim, dim youth of the earth; I had a sense 



*The word "ballon" comes from the patois, belong, hois long, which 
took its name from the great forest, "La Selva Vosagus," once covering 
the Alsatian plain and its mountains. 
4 43 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

of my transitories, with those lessons written every- 
where. And it is autumn, too. 

We got out at the immense reservoir of Alfelt which 
dams up dangerous springtime floods with its giant 
wall of masonry, for from the "knot of Europe" loosened 
waters flow to the North Sea and to the Mediterranean. 
Climbing to the top of the rocky elevation, we read 
on the monument the date of the inauguration of the 
reservoir, 1884, and the name, Prince Hohenlohe 
Schillingfurst, Statthalter. 

And, looking down, the shining villages through which 
we had just passed, Sewen, Oberbruck, Niederbruck, 
Masevaux, are like beads on the thread of the lovely 
valley, lying between the breasts of the hills. 

The mountain-ringed lake of the reservoir reflects the 
rich coloring of the hills in which it is set; white-stemmed, 
yellow-leaved birches, blood-red cherry trees; rust- 
colored beeches, larch trees shining Hke torches borne 
by wanderers, on black pine slopes; all is seen twice — 
once on the hills and once in the mirror of the lake. 

Then we mount up, up, up, twisting and turning over 
the magnificent military road, made like so many others 
since the war, to become some day the joy of tourists, 
when, thousands upon ten thousands, nay, millions upon 
millions, they shall come from over ocean and mountain 
to see what it all looks like and get the belated thrill. 

Violet hills become black, outlined against a copper- 
colored band of western horizon. Captain Bernard 
points out some English airplanes just over our heads, 
tiny, tiny specks hanging in a high waste of heaven, 
and I wonder if in one of them sits my friend, the char- 
tered accountant of the Belfort train, fulfilling his des- 
tiny in the air. 

We leave the motor at the highest point of the road, 
where trees no longer grow, and start to climb the 
grassy crest, patterned with great brown patches of 

44 



THE BALLON D'ALSACE 

barbed-wire defenses. Captain Bernard's sharp eyes 
soon discerned the chicanes, intricate, almost indistin- 
guishable pathways through the vnre, and if one knew 
them one could get through without leaving one's 
clothes. Breathless, we arrived at the table d' orientation 
and find ourselves looking out over what seemed the 
edge of the universe. In front of us lay the gorgeous 
panorama of the Alps and behind it the wide band of 
copper-colored sky, with here and there a burnishing of 
glaciers by the dipping sun. To our left stretched the 
immense and splendid valley of the Rhine, behind it 
the Black Forest, clearly yet softly outlined against a 
paler horizon. One could have rolled the whole earth 
like a ball from the feet. I felt as if suddenly freed 
from any heaviness of the flesh, and Goethe's soaring 
words brushed against my mind, and beckoned me on — 
those words he cried after he had reached the Brocken 
and was looking down on a cloud-covered Germany. 

Dem Geier gleich 

Der auf schweren Morgenwolken 

Mit sanfiem Fittig ruhend, 

Nach Beute schaut, 

Schwebe mem Lied.^ 

I knew those vast expanses for material out of which 
a new earth, if not a new heaven, must be formed, on 
some eighth day of creation. And the new earth was 
to be made out of old and conflicting desires, worn, 
yet persistent passions, small, yet greedy thoughts, the 
whole about as facile as the weighing of the winds, 
making one almost feel that He who worked with new 
materials those first seven days had the easier part. 



^ Like to the hawk 
That on auroral clouds 
Doth rest his velvet wings, 
Looking for prey, 
So hovers my song. 

45 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

I was filled, too, with a great longing for an improbable 
wisdom and strength to be breathed into the men who 
are to rehamess the plunging, escaping destinies of the 
nations. Each man that has his hands on the reins seems 
like some one clinging to a runaway horse, trying to 
dominate a relentless, unreasoning, reckless course. 

Reverberating through the eternal hills was the sound 
of heavy cannon; and before my mind came a vision 
of the great forges wherein they were formed, men work- 
ing day and night in hot, dim, noisy spaces — Creusot 
and Krupp and Skoda, and all the rest. . . . 

Some near simimit hid the dread Hartmannswiller- 
kopf, the "Verdun" of Alsace, and one of the officers 
spoke of that winter of 191 6, when its snow was always 
pink with blood and black with death — "tens of thou- 
sands sleep there." I thought of the souls breathed out 
into that pure, high ether, like to this, but cold, cold, 
almost as tenuous as the immortal stuff commingling 
with it. 

Then we started to the other edge of the summit, 
whence we might look into V^Ugante et douloureuse Lor- 
raine, for one side of the Ballon slopes toward Alsace 
and the other toward Lorraine, 

As we threaded our way carefully through more 
chicanes of barbed- wire defenses "that you had to have 
your nose in before they could be distinguished," I 
discerned on the crag three familiar silhouettes, out- 
lined against the heavens toward the Lorraine slope. 
And as things are rarely in their proper setting nowa- 
days, there on the Ballon d' Alsace were three dusty 
Y. M. C. A. men who had come from their cantine at 
Belfort. We spoke to them and gave our names, and 
the brightest one, Tallant was his name, asked if I were 
the wife of my husband — and said he'd been on the 
Mexican border. 

Then we told them where the table d' orientation was, 

46 



THE BALLON D'ALSACE 

but forgot to point out the chicanes, and we saw them 
from a distance entangled in barbed wire. Their souls 
were safe, I hope, but heaven help those khaki clothes! 

And looldng down into Lorraine from my splendid 
height was as if looking into another world, for its dis- 
tances were bronze and silver and pale green. 

Great black spots of shadow cast by wasteful masses 
of white clouds were lying heavily over those new and 
ancient battle-fields. Forever obliged to protect them- 
selves from some invader, the villages hide rather than 
display themselves, and are barely detached from the 
silvery brown of the plain, crossed here and there by 
the bosky lines of the Meuse, or those of the great canal 
joining the French river to the Rhine. And each tiny 
hill has been an altar or a fortress, often both at once. 
Over the majestic, melancholy stretch Romans have 
passed, the hosts of Attila, Normans, Germans, Bur- 
gundians, Swedes, English, and many others. Now its 
white roads sound to the tramp of American armies, are 
encumbered by giant quantities of war material brought 
from over the seas. And of all who have passed over it, 
of the most ancient even, much remains. Close against 
one another are Roman encampments, feudal castles, the 
two-sided, two-faced bastion defenses of Vauban, the 
great, mined earthworks of modern times, and now in 
leafy darknesses are the cement emplacements of the 
big gims of the twentieth century. 

But alas ! as I turned to go, pulling my gaze from the 
wide horizon (a pale, pale pink where it covered the 
western way to the city that is the heart of France), I 
saw on that slope, directly under me, a cruel statue of 
Jeanne d'Arc. A stiff yet boneless Pucelle sat astride 
an equally stiff yet boneless steed ; both seemed about to 
drop into space, the mountain falling away from them, 
and both were of a dreadful superfluity! However, 
one isn't so plagued with horrid modem statues in 

47 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

Alsace as in other places I have been, for they run rather 
to fountains and living waters. At St.-Amarin, for 
instance, I don't remember anything later or more per- 
sonal than the fiery Gallic cock, ''der spuckende Wclsch- 
hahn," surmounting a sphere, borne in turn by the 
column of the 1830 fountain; and the fountain in the 
Place du Chapitre at Masevaux, bearing the date 1768, 
has a single, lovely column, too, on whose top burns a 
stone flame in an urn. And the shaft of the fountain 
of the wine-growers at Thann is a mass of rich yet noble 
carving, surmounted by a helmeted figure bearing a 
shield on his back. Furthermore, crystal water flows 
into its six-sided emblazoned basin. 

I think of the statue of Thiers, Libirateur du Terri- 
toire, in that dusty, begonia-planted, iron-railed plot 
in front of the station at Nancy, and I could weep. 

But hereabout I haven't found a single nineteenth- 
century statesman in frock-coat and top-hat, done in 
granite, nor any bronze female pointing him the way to 
a dubious heaven, with a long finger and a heavy palm- 
branch — and so may it remain. 

Certainly the tr^s chic chef of the Military Mission 
will be well punished for his good works in Alsace if they 
ever raise a statue to him. For they will make him, too, 
out of either bronze or marble with a plaque de commis- 
saire on his frock-coated breast, and heaven knows what 
kind of a hat they'll put on him, or how the fancy will 
seize them to do his hair! And the statue won't be of 
lapis lazuli, as it should be, nor of pale sapphire, nor of 
dull turquoise, nor of any of the lovely blue stones of 
the earth, alone fit to perpetuate the beauty of the blue- 
clad men who have written France's greatest epic. 
Blue-clad men splashed about fountains at twilight, 
blue-clad men taking form and substance as they emerge 
out of gray mountain mists, blue-clad men weaving 
their cerulean patterns through the woof of long- 

48 



THE BALLON D'ALSACE 

trunked pine forests, blue-clad men like bits of turquoise 
embedded in the matrix of white roads, and what know 
I besides? 

As I gave a sigh for Art and a prayer for the serried 
ranks of her erring devotees, I found myself looking into 
another splendid valley, toward Giromagny, near where 
is a height known as La Planche des Belles Filles, after 
a story of the Thirty Years' War, when men with blue 
eyes and very light hair and sldn were for a while mas- 
ters of the domains of Belfort and Ferrette. After the 
best manner of invading armies, 'tis recorded that these 
Swedes committed many excesses, and dark-eyed girls 
lay concealed in the forest, and when they feared their 
hiding-place had been discovered they fled to the moun- 
tains, but even there they were pursued by the hosts of 
fair-haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed men, bent on the 
most elemental of errands. And again they fled precipi- 
tately, scarcely knowing their direction. When they got 
to the top they found themselves on a great ledge of 
rock and in their distress they tumbled from the height 
onto other rocks below, and the blue-eyed, fair-skinned, 
fair-haired men from the North knew them not. Hence 
the "Ledge of the Beautiful Girls." 

And then we took a last look at the vast heaping of 
the Alps; to the left, the Jungfrau and the Monsch, to 
the right, Mont Blanc, the whole great mass outlined 
against that persistent dark-red band. The glacier of 
the Jungfrau was as if in conflagration ; Mont Blanc was 
soft and roseate, yet its beauty left me cold. 

Captain Bernard said he had climbed the Ballon many 
times and only twice before had he seen the great pano- 
rama; but as, alack! to him who does not want shall be 
given, except for their gorgeousness, I would have 
turned from them indifferently, had not my beloved 
mother been dwelling almost in the shadow of Mont 
Blanc. 

49 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

But one* has written, as men of genius write of things 
in times of peace, of this Ballon d'Alsace. He who 
brought out from his Gallo-British mind new things and 
old has said in one of the most charming of books : ' ' Then 
on the left you have all the Germanics, a great sea of 
confused and dreaming people, lost in philosophies and 
creating music, frozen for the moment under a foreign 
rigidity, but some day to thaw again and to give a 
word to us others. They cannot remain long apart 
from visions." I thought they have, indeed, given a 
* ' word . " B ut when again the ' ' visions' ' ? 

I turned and followed my two blue-clad officers down 
the Alsatian slope, over the gray grass, threading neatly 
through the chicanes of the brown, barbed-wire defenses, 
and got into the motor waiting on the roadway once 
known as that of the Dukes of Lorraine. 

We were silent as we started down the great moun- 
tain. I was again wrapped in thoughts of the New Day 
to be created out of old and rotting stuffs, and of the 
death of heroes. The hills were velvet-palled against 
the deepening crimson band of light. 

Later, a panne, and we waited in a violet-valleyed 
world, illumined only by white candelabraed torches of 
strangely luminous larch and birch, while the prudent 
yet daring chauffeur changed the tire. 

A great khaki-colored motor passed us, marked with 
two stars, filled with khaki-clad men of my race, going 
up, up, whence we had come. 

Then we stopped at the little restaurant of Alfeld. 
The lake of many colors was dark and mysterious. Its 
high tints had been dipped in something deep in the 
hours since last I saw it, though strange blues and 
purples and rust colors were still reflected in it, and 
the light of a single, very yellow birch had not yet 
been snuffed. At the restaurant four glasses of white 

^ Hilaire Belloc, The Road to Rome. 

SO 



THE BALLON D'ALSACE 

liqueur were poured for us (one, of course, for the 
chauffeur), distilled from raspberries, the odor of the 
berry very strong, and long afterward the taste, the 
arri^e-goUt, remains in the mouth, as if one had just 
eaten the fruit. But one of the officers said, "All the 
same, it doesn't equal a good quetsch or kirsch or, above 
all, a good mirabclle." 

And then we dipped into the darkening valley of the 
DoUer and through dim villages found the way to 
Masevaux and the house on the Place du Chapitre, 
where the Demoiselles Braun had tea awaiting us, and 
there were stories told that made us laugh. And one 
was of the renowned 15th Dragoons, so long quartered 
there, which, briefly — and humanly — is this: 

At intervals after their departure Httle dragoons saw 
the light of a war-world, and, to be exact, fifty in all 
saw it. The cur6 was broken-hearted at the ravages 
among his sheep, but he was also a practical, long-sighted 
cure, so he wrote, presenting his idea of the matter before 
the colonel of the regiment, with the result that from 
the savings-box of that same regiment a sum was sub- 
tracted to provide ten years later for the first com- 
munion and confirmation clothes of the fifty! (Would 
you have thought of it?) Then, casting about in his 
mind how he could ftuther improve the general situation, 
this time not so much from the temporal point of view 
as from that of eternity, he decided upon a pilgrimage — 
a pilgrimage of reparation to Huppach, where is the 
shrine known as that of the Virgin of Klein Einsiedeln, 
near Sewen, through which we had just passed. He an- 
nounced the pilgrimage from the pulpit, then took the 
ftirther precaution of rounding up his strayed sheep in 
person, and in person conducting them to Huppach to 
offer up prayers and tears to the Virgin of Klein Einsied- 
eln. There were so many of them, however, and they 
were mostly so young, that history does not record the 

51 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

pilgrimage as being entirely without smiles — and God 
have mercy on us all! 

But the cure was not yet (so to speak) out of the 
woods, for fate replaced the Dragoons by another regi- 
ment, having, as it happened, a colonel possessed of a 
boundless love for his men and who couldn't do enough 
for them (or rather have the inhabitants of Masevaux 
do enough for them). 

"The inhabitants of Masevaux are very nice, very 
nice indeed," quoth he, "but the happiness of my men 
above everything. We left three thousand on the 
battlefield last week, and the others need distraction — 
of a pleasant sort. My men above everything." 

So the colonel who loved his men with a boundless 
love and, furthermore, was not one to waste time in 
vain endeavors to portray the eternal feminine as un- 
desirable, nor to render the chase unpopular, caused 
dances to be organized on this very Place du Chapitre, 
under these very linden trees, then heavy-scented, and 
every evening. The ciu-e, foreseeing trouble, with the 
aid of Heaven and his own undiscourageable will, had 
them suppressed after eight days (eight days is a long 
time) of wrestling with leagued powers both civil and 
military. And again God have mercy on us all! 

Now the virtuous, I mean the truly virtuous (that 
is, the untried, untempted virtuous), mustn't throw 
stones at Masevaux nor at this book, but rather remem- 
ber that anything could have happened to anybody had 
everything been different. And even so, hasn't a lot 
happened to many of you? You know a good deal 
better than I do just how much. 

To the popote at seven-thirty, and before I'm an hour 
older I'm going to tell you about the popote. And you'll 
wish you had been there instead of hearing about it — 
as runs the classic expression, "Regarder manger des 
glaces," and I give the translation, "Watch others eat 

52 



THE BALLON D'ALSACE 

ice-cream," partly because I want you all to know just 
what I mean, and partly because some one in the United 
States wrote to my publishers that My Lorraine Journal 
was a nice book, but couldn't they suggest to me that I 
write my books either in French or English. 

Mrs. O'S. : "But, my dear Mr. Graham" (his name is 
Graham, and this may be his chance of immortality), 
"I couldn't write one entirely in French to save my soul, 
and to save my soul I'd find it impossible when every- 
thing I'm writing about takes place in France not to 
slip into la belle langue occasionally." 

Mr. Graham (from a distance): "Occasionally! 
There you're at it again. Occasionally!" (It does get 
on his nerves.) 

Mrs. O'S. : "And there is another saying to the effect 
that 'On ne pent pas contenier tout le monde et son pire.' 
That is to say, dear Mr. Graham, that you can't please 
everybody and your father as well, and this, of course, 
mostly applies to young men (are you a son or are you 
a father?) trying to win smiles outside family circles — 
and father ultimately paying the bills. But as it occurs to 
me here, there must be some connection." 

Mr. Graham: "I don't see it. And while I'm about 
it, I'd like to tell you a thing or two concerning those 
Mexican books of yours. The Spanish was awful — even 
The Yale Review and The Nation noticed it." 

Mrs. O'S. (getting a bit nasty): "It's about all 
either of them did notice, especially The Yale Review; 
and nobody loves me on The Nation, but it was entirely 
the printer's fault. He received them immaculate. I 
turned my face to the wall for three days after a glance 
at A Diplomat's Wife. But then you probably don't 
remember how perfectly sweet about these very books 
The North American Review was (a man with the most 
perceptive of souls and a neat flair for the imponderabil- 
ities, named Lawrence Oilman, does their book reviews), 

S3 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

also The New Republic, which possesses a man named 
Alvin Johnson, inexorably sure about the humanities, 
separating with a single, infallible gesture the goats 
of letters from the sheep (but he still thinks, alas! that 
all men are bom free and equal). And The New York 
Sun was kind, kind, and The New York Evening Post, too, 
and they do say this latter rarely says anything nice 
about people till they're dead and can't enjoy it, and 
The New York Tribune, which has the reputation of 
being very particular about itself, and The New York 
Times, which never jokes and is known as a searcher 
after truth." 

Mr. Graham, dreadfully bored with me, mimibles 
something like "this is what you get when you try to 
do somebody a good turn." I couldn't catch it all, as 
he'd doubtless continued farther on his journey through 
the great Northwest. He wrote from one of a chain of 
"Grand Trunk Pacific Hotels," and all I can think of 
to call after him is Bon voyage, though he won't like it. 

And now back to Masevaux in the valley of the Boi- 
ler — Masevaux smelling a bit Hke nice leather things 
in expensive shops, with a hint of falling leaves. 



VI 

LA POPOTE 

AND how shall he who has not dined be strong? 
>• And how shall he who is not girded fight? And 
how shall he who has not wept laugh? And how shall 
he who hath not made a free offering of his life find it? 
And many other things occur to me, but enough for the 
wise of heart. 

And now for la popote, which is in what was once the 
house of the Oberforster, in a street doubtless always 
muddy, looking out on the church, and it is square, of 
gray stucco, and red brick with a hall running through 
the center, like many and many a house. 

The woodwork is everywhere painted brown and the 
wall-paper, too, is brown, a lighter, depressing brown. 
Above the dining-table is a ponderous, imitation-bronze 
chandelier, but its cruel light now shines on blue-clad 
men who have fought the good fight, agreeable, culti- 
vated men of the world, and it touches strongly scar 
and galloon and decoration of these, selected ex millihus 
et ex millihus, by hidden powers, to return from battle- 
field and trench. . . . 

It's the Oberforster's glass that we use; it's his imi- 
tation-bronze fruit-dish that is now filled with dark, 
rich grapes of victory. It's his imitation-tin and real- 
glass punch-bowl that is on the table by the window. 
On the porcelain stove that heats well, too well (I sit 
with my back close to it), is a d6gagi marble bibelot, the 
heads of a man and a woman in basso-rilievo cut in an 

55 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

obtrusively chance bit of marble, and it bears the motto, 
''Amor condusse not.'' Perhaps on their honeymoon, 
the Oberforster and his bride had made the classic 
Italienische Reise, and had pressed closely, so closely 
against each other in the railway carriage, that the ap- 
prehensive fellow-voyagers shut their eyes or sought 
another compartment. The Teutonic "will to live" is 
irresistible, and when it's at work there's nothing to 
be done except get out of the way. 

Theirs were the lithographs representing beings of 
the Biedermayer epoch, theirs the many- tiered ma- 
chine-turned, walnut sideboard. Theirs was (I know 
not how it got into that company of ersatz and imitation) 
a beautiful old glass carafe, a shepherd and a sacri- 
ficial lamb engraved upon it (perhaps once a church 
vessel), but in it was a stopper, half cork and half tin, 
with an imitation turquoise in the middle. 

Theirs was a smoking-set of imitation tin whose mas- 
sive ash-receiver in the most horrid art nouveau continu- 
ally mocked the delicate spirals of smoke. Said the 
commandant one evening, flicking his cigar-ash into the 
dreadful thing: 

"That invasion was almost as bad as this. You could 
have bought an ash-receiver like it in every big shop 
in Paris." 

' 'And in every little one," finished Laferriere. ' ' Thank 
God the frontier is closed, even at the price." 

In the corner between the windows was an upright 
piano piled with the best of music, and there was a large 
and completely uninteresting turned-wood clock, stopped 
at 12.25 on August 7th, four years ago. 

And the man that earned and owned it all is dead 
in a soldier's grave, and the woman, Anna by name, 
weeps somewhere her lost love and the equally lost gods 
of her household. Et c'est la guerre. 

As for Madame Labonne's cooking, she knows her 

S6 




[See page 20 



COMMANDANT POULET 



LA POPOTE 

business, and if it weren't the obvious duty of those 
sitting about the table to take the gifts the gods and 
Madame Labonne provide, I should feel I were living 
much too well. 

She gives us a gdieau a la crdnie that disappears smooth- 
ly, leaving but an exquisite memory. She has another 
gdteau d Voignon (don't turn away; it's perfectly de- 
licious and takes a day to make the onion part), her 
filets melt in the mouth, and her purees are the insub- 
stantial fabric of a dream. When she serves the classic 
Alsatian dish of sauerkraut decorated with boiled po- 
tatoes and shining pieces of melting pork, you don't 
really need to eat for twenty -four hours, and wouldn't 
go to the popote except for the conversation and the 
company. Sometimes the officers, the unwedded ones, 
think of marrying Madame Labonne — she's fat and about 
sixty and doesn't try to look young (by her works alone 
they shall know her), and the married ones think of 
trying to introduce her into their happy homes in some 
role or other. 

And when they move into the rich, shining Alsatian 
plain, that they have looked down upon these four long 
years, she is to take part in the triumphal procession. 

And this is how we generally find ourselves placed 
at table. I sit on the right of Commandant Poulet, 
who, somewhat as a prince of story, for these four years 
has administered with much calm, with great good 
sense, with wide understanding, and, above all, with 
immense tact and kindness, the not always simple 
affairs of the delivered ones of the reconquered triangle. 

Only he can know the difficulties of the French Mili- 
tary Mission, though all may see the results. It is a 
land flowing with honey if not with milk (the busy bee 
in and out of war-time doth its work, though, it would 
seem, not so the cow). 

In full maturity it has been given to Commandant 

57 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

Poulet to see results, and sometimes I have looked 
almost in and at a man whose strange lot d\iring the 
war years has been constructive work. His first public 
appearance was when, as tout jeune lieutenant remplis- 
sant des bouts de table, he accompanied President Loubet 
to St. Petersburg on his 1902 visit. Since then many- 
honors have been his, and here in Alsace he has been 
both Paul and Apollo, for he has reaped where he has 
planted and God has given the increase. Trh chic, 
in his horizon-blue, with his high decorations on his 
breast, et trds homme du monde. This is what I see and 
it seems very fair. Of his personal life what can I know? 
— except that it must be as the hfe of all that walk the 
earth, disillusion succeeding illusion, grief tripping up 
joy; for there is no getting away from the old verses: 

Ainsi du tnal au Hen, 
De la joie a la peine 
Passe la vie humaine. 

Somewhere in Lorraine the commandant has a de- 
stroyed chS,teau. But he can always dwell in the dwelling 
of his labors in Alsace. 

Vis-^-vis is his first aide, Captain Tirman, whom I 
saw on my arrival, always with deep rings under his 
eyes, too much in rooms and bending over desks — il 
boit le travail. Entirely devoted to his chief. He is 
musical, too, and sometimes while waiting in the dining- 
room for the mess to assemble we find him playing 
Beethoven or Bach, or more recent and more com- 
promising Germans, from the piles of the Oberforster's 
music on the Oberforster's piano. La musique n'a pas 
de patrie — ^for musical men who have fought. (But let 
a zealous civil far from the front hear a strain of Schu- 
mann or Brahms issuing from some window and he runs 
straightway to the police.) Captain Tirman wears the 
Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre, and is so pale, 

S8 



LA POPOTE 

I am told, because of the hard campaigns he has passed 
through, and wounds and illness. He is always in charge 
in the absence of the commandant, but though iire 
Tirmannis^ is one of the gentle jokes of the popote, no 
signs of tyranny were apparent to me. 

Captain Bernard, second aide, is, like the commandant, 
from Lorraine, and had prepared himself for the Paris 
bar. He conducted himself admirably during the war, 
Laferriere tells me. Wounded three times, he bears 
a great scar — sa belle cicatrice, as his comrades proudly 
call it — on his forehead (Verdun, August, 191 6) and over 
his heart la Legion d'Honneur and the Croix de Guerre. 
Always very carefully dressed — tir^ d quatre ^pingles 
(pulled out by four pins), as they nearly all are. 

At his right sits Captain Serin from Toulouse, the 
only Meridional at the table. He is very straight- 
forward and imcomplicated, I should judge, as regards 
his psychology, with the rather objective eye of the man 
from the south. (They don't dream the way we farther 
north do.) He sees a joke at any distance and is the 
sort, they tell me, who would obey as simply as he 
would breathe, without a thought of hesitation, an order 
unto death. The sort that when told to bring up re- 
inforcements at a moment when it seems impossible, 
quite simply does it, and it only happens to happen 
that he is living. He is not tall, but wide of shoulder, 
holding himself very straight, and on his breast there 
are ribbons, too. He is chief of the Gendarme Service, 
the first and last provost of Alsace reconquered. 

On the other side of Captain Bernard sits Captain 
Toussaint, chief of the Forestry Service of the Masevaux 
district, clad in bottle-green, with silver bugles on his 
collar and the Legion of Honor and other decorations 
on his breast, d'une grande honU, his comrades tell me. 
He is from the north, from Douai (his brother was 
killed at the front), tall, slim, pale-faced, lantern- jawed, 
5 59 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

everything is in his eyes — in the regard, as some one said 
of him — and much of his life is passed alone in forests. 
So different from Captains Bernard and Lavallee, living 
in Paris, between whom he generally sits; and he nearly 
always comes in late from his forests for luncheon and 
dinner, 

"For Toussaint, Creation is represented by the first 
day when the heavens were formed, and everything that 
came afterward had something to do with forests," some 
one said last night, as he was talking rather hotly about 
the war-time cutting down of the trees of France, and 
the influence the loss of forests had on the life of 
nations. Tris catholique, also; but then these men 
of the Mission, with all of whom I have entered taber- 
nacles, are of an extreme reverence. What they "be- 
lieve" I know not. 

Lieutenant Laferriere sits sometimes by me, some- 
times at the end of the table. He has early gray hair, 
a fresh complexion, gray -blue eyes with a certain inward- 
ness of expression, a smiling movement of the lips when 
speaking, and, with all his wit, an extreme kindness in 
human judgments. Indeed, I am struck by something 
of softness and patience in the eyes of each one of these 
men to whom nothing of war is foreign, who have looked 
on all combinations of mortal anguish, and whose eyes 
at times, too, have had the red look, the hard, bright 
look of men who have just killed. 

Laferriere is very cultivated after the way of us 
dwellers in cities. He was Doctor of Law at the Uni- 
versity of Lille. On the 2d of August, 1914, he closed 
his books, after which, as under-officer, he had lived for 
months that closely packed life of the trenches, "where 
one was never physically a moment alone" (hardest of 
all hardships, I have heard fastidious men say), then he 
had been called as jurist to the Mission. Emotional, 
but through circumstances or will, how can I know? 

60 



LA POPOTE 

giving the effect of ha\'ing dominated the personal — to 
what point also I know not. 

Lieutenant Lavallee, but recently come from Paris, 
sits at another end. His personality is less striking than 
some of the others at the table, though he has une tSte 
un pen mauresque, like pictures of the Conquistadores, 
and is inclined to solemnity of mien. He has a charming 
voice, fresh, with warm notes in it, and sometimes of an 
evening sings Breton chansons populaires. We especially 
like the one concerning la douce Annette, who spun a 
fatal love-story with a certain Pierre who wouldn't let 
go her hand. 

There is one, Stroll by name, now absent, but his com- 
rades evidently love him, for I often hear, "What a 
pity Stroll isn't here"; or, "That is Stroll's story." 

Also for a few days en visite lilce myself is Captain 
Antoni, born at Strasbourg, but very French in appear- 
ance, a tall, svelte, thin-faced man with a rising and 
falling inflexion in his voice, who has been through the 
whole campaign and wears many decorations. He said 
last night that the fighting at Verdun, especially that 
at Hill 304, was the worst he had seen. 

At this moment the Verdun sector, which knows the 
blood of men of many climes, is moist with that of my 
countrymen. 

Now this is part of what I see as I sit at table with 
these men. The common patriotic effort tends to screen 
the personal Ufe of each, of which I know nothing. But 
I do know that destiny is largely formed by character 
and endowments, and, barring the fact that time and 
chance happeneth to all, I would be tempted to wager 
that when such or such a thing came to such or such a 
one, thus he received it — gift or blow — thus he used it, 
once his own. So unescapable and visible are the se- 
quences of character. 

Sometimes we play bridge in the evening, pleasant, 

61 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

easy bridge, anybody taking a card back when once 
played, and changing his mind about declarations. 
As they so truly say, "Nous jouons pour nous amuser.'' 

And yesterday there appeared on the table the famous 
cafetidre and S6rin, his face shining with a great light, 
performed the rites. It was one of those large, high 
glass bulbs with a nickel coffee-pot below. Dry coffee 
is put into the glass bulb, water into the pot, an alcohol- 
lamp beneath, and the whole is hermetically sealed. 
After which, according to the mysterious and wonderful 
laws of nature, the water rises and wets the coffee; it 
must rise thrice, giving forth at the same time volcanic 
sounds. During the ceremony nothing else is thought 
of. The officiating high priest is harried with liturgical 
suggestions, or unkind remarks are made about his 
natural endowments. As that corked spout of the pot, 
horrid with potentialities, is turned now toward one, 
now toward the other, men who would have given their 
lives without a thought in the trenches, get nervous and 
call to Serin, "Dis-donc, tu vas me crever un ceil!" "Not 
toward Madame. It would be too terrible," etc., etc., 
and in the end the spout, with all its possibilities, is 
turned toward the Oberf orster's made-in-Germany clock. 
After which one has a delicious cup of coffee and conver- 
sation becomes normal.^ 

Last night I found they were talking about giving a 
certificate of good conduct to one of them who is mar- 
ried, to take home with him to reassure his wife. A 
comrade, after a little badinage in the Latin manner, 
but very discreet I must say, objects: "But now there 
won't be any permissions," and, doubtfiilly, "We would 
have to give him the certificate for three whole months." 



* A letter from Laf erriere of November 20th, recounting national events, 
and the breaking up of the little group, says also: "La cafetihre, lafameuse 
cafetilre a une large felure qui fait craindre sa fin prochaine. Ce serait un 
symbole?" 

62 



LA POPOTE 

Then, like the antiphon of some song, a voice said, 
"Trois mois, c'est long." 

Another said, ''Trois mois, c'est trds long." 

Another, with a sigh, "C'est trop long ..." And I 
to smile — wdthin myself. 

Then a stumbling home on an invisible but strong 
horizon-blue arm, through the inky streets, ankle-deep 
in mud. Sometimes I haven't known which one of the 
various kind arms it was, the electric pocket-lamp only 
occasionally making the darkness more manifest. No 
one to bump into, as circulation in the streets is forbidden 
after nine o'clock, on account of possible espionage. 

And you will say these are pleasant days! 

Later. — Hunting in the bookcase, I found a small 
diamond-printed copy of Hermann und Dorothea. As, 
to the sound of near night-firing, I turned its smooth 
old pages, I realized it for one of the most completely 
objective works of genius ever born into the world. No 
thread of its maker's identity is woven with it, no color 
of his personal experience. I felt but a sense of his com- 
plete and serene equilibrium, though the stream of 
words, bearing those golden thoughts, was so softly 
flowing, so crystal-clear, that it made me remember a 
line from another of Goethe's poems, as subjective as 
this is objective: 

Der Geist ist Brdutigam. 
Wort sd die Braut. 

In the little preface I found that the poet, in his old 
age, was wont to say of Hermann und Dorothea that of 
his long poems it was almost the only one that gave him 
pleasure. I seemed to understand what he meant. By 
reason of its complete objectivity, he could have had 
no consciousness of that inadequacy famiHar to mortals 
contemplating anything formed from themselves. No 
suffering had attended its birth; rather it would seem 

63 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

to have formed itself spontaneously on the heights out 
of some plastic sttiff, light and bright as summer air, 
imperishable as granite. It did not recall to Goethe 
(nor does it to one who reads) that night of personal 
anguish, that day of emptiness, that hour of longing, 
nor even some glimpsing, vistaed moment wherein per- 
sonal fulfilment held out its shining, shadowy hand. 

In spite of the sound of cannon and the smarting of 
my eyes from the strain of the tiny Gothic print, for a 
moment within myself an almost equal feeUng of har- 
mony arose, taking a form of Peace, like an antique 
statue, free yet restrained, noble yet persuasive; bearing 
no one's mark, nor any signs of workmanship, except 
that stamped by its own beauty. Then it vanished, 
leaving the little book to throb between my hands to 
the beat of my own times. Though generations had 
passed on and other wars were being fought, and the 
word "freedom" was again on every lip, as always, the 
women, the children, the old, were paying the heaviest 
tithes of invasion. Had I not seen like streams of 
fugitive populations flooding into Paris that hideous 
spring of 191 8, heard the cries of anguish from those 
fleeing before an enemy army? Then also death and 
birth waited not on circumstance, and love and hate, 
fear and hope, hurry and exhaustion, were at work in 
strange commingling. I had seen deeds of succor, too, 
like unto those of the lovers, proffered in boundless de- 
votion, by nameless, uncounted men and women, com- 
ing from the world's ends to minister to its woe. 

A vision of toux ceux qui ont bu a la coupe amdre de 
cette ipoque passed before me. Deeply sighing, I at last 
put out my light, thinking "war is war," needing no 
adjectives, and of the changelessness of the human heart, 
however the formulas may be multiplied and renewed; 
and forever V<z victis! 



VII 

THE HOUSES OP THE CHANOINESSES 

THE COMMANDANT TRACES THE RECONQUERED TRIANGLE ON MY 
MAP. THE MILITARY MISSION 

MO AW AY, November 4th. — Dreamed of old griefs 
and awakened with the heavy taste their memory 
can even now distil. Raining. The yellow-and-brown 
carpet under the Hndens of the Place du Chapitre is wet 
and dull and the few leaves still 'on the trees are soft 
and heavy, the houses damp and shabby. "The old 
wounds burn," even here, where all is new and bright, 
and fancy flings itself delicately, amorously, consolingly 
about the pleasant happenings of each day. . . . Fortu- 
nately my breakfast is brought early by a smiling maid, 
w^ho enters, bringing with her the aroma of fresh tea 
and the delicately scented, dark-green, liquid honey 
of these pine forests. There is that blessed volatiliza- 
tion of night-grief, and I arise to another pleasant day, 
knowing once again, however, that everywhere the old 
ghosts find one. . . . 

The rainy light coming in seems but to darken the 
oak-paneled room. What there is of wall-paper is a 
darkish blue with a narrow frieze of red. The curtains 
are stripes of red-and-blue cloth. Even the daytime 
cover of the very comfortable eider-downed bed is of the 
same red-and-blue-striped stuff. It was because they 
were the colors of the French uniform that the young 
man once living herein, under German rule, chose them. 

But he himself is gone, gone the hope of his house. 

6S 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

One of his sisters was saying to me last night as I tarried 
for a few minutes in the little sitting-room, where I 
had first found them all rehanging the portraits of their 
ancestors : 

"The price for peace is so high and terrifying that 
one can't yet rejoice in it. Rather one says to oneself 
in desolation, 'and all that was so precious is gone, that 
in the end one may sit around deserted fireplaces, or 
try to find shelter under bombarded roofs, and be at 
grips with the terrible aprds-guerre!' " And of her brother : 

"At least he fell for the cause that is so dear to us;" 
she added after a moment's silence, "it might so easily 
have been otherwise." 

I have noticed everywhere a great pride tempering 
grief over fallen beloved dead. Even in mothers' hearts 
this pride is strong enough to console. They know why 
their sons were born, and to many a death of glory has 
been as a second birth ; he whom they lost is, in some way, 
laid a second time, bright, beautiful, complete, in their 
arms, and safe from life. And they are blessed who so 
mourn. 

Sometimes there are further griefs. I knew a mother 
of twin sons; one had fallen far away, a gentle, yoimg, 
musician son, in a fierce, unequal conflict, whose details 
she was not spared; the other had been brought back 
to her on his twenty-first birthday a sightless stimip. 
I cannot forget her as she stood, tall, black-veiled, by a 
pillared door, like an antique statue of grief, her eyes 
as dry as marble eyes. And though she, too, said: 

"At least I know why I bore them, and it was for 
something more than myself," the obsession of a further 
grief was in her eyes as she added, "I must not die first — 
and he is so young!" 

Here on the borderland I find there is often an ad- 
ditional reason for pride, where Fate, which could so 
easily have willed it otherwise, sometimes has allowed 

66 



HOUSES OF THE CHANOINESSES 

the beloved to die for the beloved cause, as did the broth- 
er whose room is now mine. And this is his story, or 
rather the end of it. Those first four days of August, 
19 1 4, he had gone about the mountain heights and passes 
with his field-glass continually at his eyes to see if help 
were not coming from the hills in the guise of the panta- 
lons rouges. But on the fourth day he was obliged to 
accompany his regiment into Germany, where he stayed 
three months. On hearing of the battle of the Mame 
through a French prisoner, he cried, "Nous avons eu 
Id une belle victoire!" ("We have had a great victory!") 
and he was put under arrest. His one idea being to 
desert, he asked to go into the lines again, knowing there 
would be no opportunity, if he remained in prison, train- 
ing recruits. His chance came when he was fighting 
against the English in the north. His chiefs being killed 
or wounded, he, as under-officer, found himself in com- 
mand of a company of a hundred and fifty men. With 
him deserted ninety-seven others. Later, he fell fight- 
ing in the French lines near Tahure. And this (it is 
perhaps much) is all I know of him or ever shall; if he 
were beloved of a woman or had loved many, I know not. 
He, the last of his race, took his name with him to the 
grave. 

All that surrounds me as I write was his. His 
the full bookshelves, with an elaborate set of a 
Geschichte der Liter atur, and a Welt-Geschichte in many 
volumes, his the books of early boyhood, of travel, the 
many old, Httle books of prayer in tooled and beveled 
bindings of a generation or two ago, and the piles of 
the Revue des Deux Mondes. Two eighteenth-century 
maps hang on the walls, one of "Alsatia," with queer 
German names for familiar places, and another of ' ' Gal- 
lia," and there is an incomparable, white, porcelain 
stove which heats quickly and gives out its pleasant 
heat dtuing long hours. 

67 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

On a little corner shelf is an old engraving of the 
last chanoinesse of the Chapter of Masevaux, Xaviere 
de Ferrette. She is dressed in full canonicals, with a 
large ruched coif and ermine-trimmed mantle ; some high 
order in a Maltese-cross design is suspended from the 
broad ribbon worn across her breast, and in her hands 
is a richly embossed prayer-book. 

The long face with its immensely high forehead has 
a full-lipped, very human mouth, and in the right, upper 
corner is her sixteen-quartered coat of arms. 

The story of the Chapter would make good, though 
long, reading, for, like many other things in this part 
of the world, it begins with Charlemagne and ends with 
the French Revolution. Of both France seems equally 
proud, and certainly il y en a pour tous les goMs. 

Women always seem to have had great influence on the 
life of their times in Alsace. Not even those with the 
vote and all the rights, together with all the privileges 
of our times, can pretend to half the influence of certain 
holy women of the so-called dark ages. They built 
on hilltops and in valleys those many citadels of peace 
whose traces still are to be seen, where Hfe was free from 
violence, and, like sweet odors uncorked, their good deeds 
have perfumed the ages. Saint-Odile, Vierge Candide 
et Forte, daughter of Duke Atalric, is patroness of Alsace, 
and in her many have sought the feminine ideal of the 
Alsatian soul; and there are Saint-Richarde, tried by 
fire for a guiltless love, wife of Louis the Fat, and Her- 
rade, Abbess of Hohenburg, author of the famous Hortus 
Deliciarum, preserved through seven centuries and 
destroyed in the siege of Strasbourg in 1870. These 
are but a few, and the histories of the secular dwellers 
in the Rhine Valley, spectacular though they were, 
seem often quite colorless contrasted with those of these 
saints of the Holy Roman Empire. 

The first monks and pilgrims to come to Alsace were 

68 



HOUSES OF THE CHANOINESSES 

from Ireland (the last of these before the very end of 
the world will doubtless also come from Erin) . It would 
appear that even in those days it could not be said of 
the Irish that they were neither hot nor cold, which is 
probably one of the reasons "why God loves them." In 
the lovely rivered plains and great forests of the Rhine 
Valley it was they who built the first chapels and traced 
the first paths. It was an Irish monk whom Atalric, 
hoping for a son, consulted before the birth of his daugh- 
ter; but of Saint-Odile another time. 

The house next the one wherein I dwell was that of 
the abbess, and now belongs to Madame Auguste Lauth. 

It, too, has a beautiful stairway, with a time-polished 
oaken balustrade, and it contains the great room of 
noble proportions and lovely panelings (still heated by 
the celebrated porcelain stove, fit only for a museum), 
where the ladies of the Chapter assembled in their rich 
toilets and great coifs to go to the church, reached by a 
two-storied gallery, which old prints show as having 
a most distinguished air, with its sloping roof pierced 
with oval windows and its pleasant proportions. But 
the upper story and the roof were done away with in 
the nineteenth century, which has demolished so much 
(not always in heat of battle), and it is now but a long, 
formless building used for some sort of storeb-ouse con- 
nected with the Koechlin manufactories. And the way 
the six houses came to be constructed was this: 

The Abbess Xaviere de Ferrette, a woman of resolu- 
tion and energy, as one can easily see by the high fore- 
head and long jaw, becoming alarmed at the increasing 
expenses of the Chapter and the equally decreasing 
revenues, decided on some radical remedies. Through 
the Middle Ages, down to her time, the chanoinesses 
had Uved under one roof, and, according to the holy 
rule, ate together. But with them fared so many out- 
siders, their friends and their friends' friends, with their 

69 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

domestics, that they found themselves being literally 
eaten out of house and home. The abbess called a 
solemn meeting wherein they arranged for the building 
of separate houses, whose construction was given into 
the hands of K16ber, then architect and inspector of 
the royal buildings at Belfort. Pictures of Kleber, 
known rather impersonally to Americans by the Parisian 
avenue that bears his name, abound in Alsace, and show 
a sensitive, artistic face, with a pleasure-loving mouth 
above a short chin, and a halo of light, curly hair. He 
met an early death in Napoleon's Egyptian campaign. 
'*Il avait six pieds en tout,'" his contemporaries were wont 
admiringly to say of him. 

In these separate houses, with garden attached, each 
chanoinesse was to Hve alone with her demoiselle, who 
at her death would step into her very comfortable shoes, 
and the abbess only was to receive guests in the name 
of the Chapter. 

The house I lodged in was that of the Chanoinesse 
von Reutner. These dames had to make their titles 
very clear to their earthly mansions, each having to 
possess sixteen quarterings evenly balanced, eight on her 
father's side and eight on her mother's side. Gentle- 
men were chosen to give their word on this somewhat 
elusive subject, and methought 'twas well they didn't 
have to put their hand in the fire at the same time, for 
what can be sworn to with certainty of those things 
which have their origin on the mysterious borderland of 
the emotions? However . . . 

The chanoinesses belonged mostly to the great families 
of Alsace, the Masevaux, the Ferrettes, though the 
records show many German names like Furstenburg and 
Seckingen, or French like Beaujffremont and Fontenoy. 

Sometimes the Abbey and Chapter were under French 
domination, sometimes under Austrian, sometimes they 
would be ceded to noble families like those of the Counts 

70 



HOUSES OF THE CHANOINESSES 

of Bollwiller and of Fugger, and in many ways their 
history had been checkered since their foundation in 
the eighth century. 

And as for the Thirty Years' War, they could have 
told tales of the Swedish invasion scarcely to be beaten 
by certain tales of our days. Indeed, so complicated is 
the history of those times, every shade and branch of 
combatant having fought against every other shade 
and branch, in kaleidoscopic changes, that when Turenne, 
allied with the Spaniards, revolted against the king, 
Louis XIV, it was a Swede, Rosen by name, who helped 
the Marechal du Plessis Praslin to conquer him at Rethel. 
Rosen, who with his brothers had come originally from 
Livonia with the armies of Gustavus Adolphus, then 
promptly put on his standard a tower falling on a rose- 
bush in full bloom, with the device, Malgr6 la Tour les 
Roses fleuriront} 

In turning over pages concerning the involved chron- 
icles of this borderland, I feel once again that history 
is, of all things, the most difficult to write, because of 
having to do with facts, and what more elusive than 
facts, eternally subjective? Even this simplest record of 
historic days is as different from one that another might 
have written about the same things as if it dealt, instead, 
let us say, with the genial suggestion of letting the Hot- 
tentots and the Zulus have their own government. It 
is that fantasy-awakening thing called temperament 
that is forever at work with facts, one thing always 
suggestive of another, rather than explanatory of itself, 
and I frankly rejoice that the "primrose by the river's 
brim" is to me something more than a primrose. 

I am now such a long way from the history of the 
Chapter that there is scarcely time to get back, and so 
I will finish quickly by saying that in the epoch pre- 

^ In spite of the Tower (Turenne was a La Tour d'Auvergne) the Roses 
will bloom. 

71 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

ceding the Revolution it found itself entangled in various 
temporal affairs, especially lawsuits with the inhabitants 
concerning their convenient but disappearing feudal 
rights. Otherwise life was probably not too strenuous 
for the chanoinesses. As nothing escapes the influence 
of its hour and age, why should one think the Chapter 
entirely escaped those of that light, pervading, charm- 
ing, inconsequent, rich thing known as the eighteenth 
century, where everything seems to have finished by a 
song, or a witty quatrain, or by delicious angels holding 
up holy-water founts in the shape of lovely shells. 

To the popote at 12.15. — Its windows look out on the 
unmistakably plain timepiece in the church tower, and 
everybody knows when anybody is late, and just how 
late, and there's a nice little green box on the table 
designed for fines, but only intermittently insisted on. 

Commandant Poulet greets me with the words, "At 
three o'clock to-day Austria ceases hostilities." Some- 
thing cruel and red seemed suddenly rolled away. 

In a flash I saw that Viennese pre-war world I had 
known so well, partaking tranquilly of the pleasant 
things of life, public events making little noise, intel- 
lectual passion absent — or discouraged, and things easy, 
easy — except for those dying of hunger. But that world 
has been burned to ashes, and the winds of destiny are 
about to scatter even them. 

Then, as usual, some one read the American communi- 
que. 

And to the deeds of the First Army must be added 
those of the National Guard, for the words Texas, 
Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, New Mexico, 
New York, New Jersey, are stamped in fadeless red 
upon the villages and banks of the Meuse. 

We talked long, and at two o'clock, as we arose from 
table, I knew that those others to the east had already 
arisen from the bitter meal of defeat, and after the 

72 



HOUSES OF THE CHANOINESSES 

manner of human hearts were adjusting themselves 
to the things that are. And perhaps there in Vienna 
they may not find it so difficult. They've been defeated 
before and they're far enough east to have a touch of 
fatalism. 

Later. — Through mist and low-hanging clouds and 
rain with Captain Bernard to Sewen, where we visited 
first the school. Neat rows of sabots were in the hall- 
way, all alike to me, but it appears some spirit in the 
feet leads each unmistakably to his or her own pair. 
A dozen children only were in the schoolroom, the 
others ill with grippe. 

The school-teacher, a tall, horizon-blue-clad French- 
man, with kind eyes and a decoration on his breast, 
had just finished the dictation. Its subject was de la 
viande (concerning meat). Looking at the copy-book 
of the nearest little boy, very blue-eyed, I read de la 
fiande, and his dictation was further embeUished by 
sounds reminiscent of German rule. ''Chez le bourg^, 
le tinton, le charcoutier, le boutin, le zocisse," but as I 
said, that's their German ear — and Httle by Uttle it 
will be done away with and "French as she is spoke" 
will take its place. One small boy who wrote a beauti- 
ful, copper-plate hand was stone-deaf, but he had dear, 
questioning eyes and something patient in his being. 
I asked, when we came out, if nothing could be done 
for him. But the master said, with a terrible finality, 
"His father is an alcoholic." 

It is evidently not without result that they distil 
their quetsch and their kirsch, their rose haws and their 
gentian, and everything else that has the merest embryo 
of a fruit or a berry or leaf in these pleasant valleys; 
as to which the bright-eyed, Italian-looking cur6 initiated 
us further, as you will see. 

Leaving the school, we went to the church, beautifully 
familiar to me against the sky, but completely and, 

73 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

from our point of view, hopelessly modernized within; 
though I couldn't help feeling that for those who come 
from dingy farms and dung-heaps the crude splendor 
of that house of God must be greatly comforting. 

The old ossuary chapel nearby, with its fifteenth- 
century vaulting, was crowded with beautiful things 
from the church at Thann. The carvings on the choir 
stalls, of the most delicate workmanship, were amusing 
to boot, nothing human being foreign to the artists 
that made them. One figure forming an arm-rest had 
a swollen cheek bound up in a cloth, and, furthermore, 
he evidently had an ache in the center of his being, 
for he was doubled up, his hands pressed close to his 
person in the classic position of one so suffering. An- 
other showed a man leaning over, with delicately modeled 
back, his head in his hands, but his ache was very mani- 
festly spiritual. Another had a goiter, and monkeys 
and parrots abounded, the native fancy of the fifteenth 
century evidently being out on a loose snaffle. A cele- 
brated row of musical angels were so delicately carved, 
with cymbal and harp and bugle and lyre and flute, 
that they would be well placed in some vitrine rather 
than high on a choir stall in a dim Gothic church. The 
celebrated statue in stone of Saint-Theobald from the 
column of his fountain at Thann had been brought here 
for safety, too, and I fingered it as well as many another 
thing generally beyond reach. 

As we came out, the clock in the tower of the church 
struck three. The great and disastrous Austrian war-act 
was finished. 

It was a moment beyond words, and as we walked 
silently over to the cure's house I thought of the cruel, 
interminable lists of dead and wounded and missing 
in the Vienna newspapers that winter of 191 5, when the 
Russians were flooding Galicia and spilling over the 
ridges of the Carpathians. The cure, however, young, 

74 



HOUSES OF THE CHANOINESSES 

with fine, Italian face-bones, and frayed and spotted 
cassock, somewhat changed our thoughts by bringing 
out various of the thirty-four specimens of distilled 
liqueurs which are the pride and playthings of these 
valleys, explaining to us with snapping eyes special 
variations of his distillings. Holding a bottle and a 
glass up against the light in his long, thin primiiij hands, 
he poured me slowly something wrested from the moun- 
tain-ash (I had thought I might as well have a completely 
new sensation), and I went about the rest of the after- 
noon feeling as if a hot stone were lodged in my breast. 

Arrived at Masevaux, we drove to a house on the 
Place du Chapitre, w^here I found another interior of the 
kind I am now familiar with — that of the high and com- 
fortable Alsatian bourgeoisie. 

Madame Chague, large, white-haired, energetic, intel- 
ligent, agreeable, received us flanked by an amiable 
married daughter and a thin, upstanding veteran, his 
ribbon of honor in his buttonhole. But, to be perfectly 
frank, the veterans get on my nerves. It's the picture 
of what the gorgeous young heroes of our great war 
will be one day, sans eyes, sans teeth, sans hair, sans 
everything, and toutes les fins sont tristes. 

"Now," said Madame Chague when once started and 
tea had been poured (accompanied by cakes you don't 
get a chance to serve unless you are delivre, and you have 
to be well delivered, or else never in bondage, to get 
the chance to eat them) , ' ' the government must proceed 
with a good deal of caution as well as consideration. 
The Alsatians aren't like anybody but themselves. 
They mustn't lay hands on our little ideas and ways, 
'ces Messieurs de V Administration ont compris cela' 
[with an appreciative look at Bernard]. We held on 
all these years, awaiting the day of deliverance. Enfin, 
for two generations we have looked on the reconquest of 
Alsace as the coming of heaven upon earth, as if that 
6 75 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

once come to pass, there would be nothing more to 
desire." 

She said all these things with an appraising light in her 
eye; being a clever old lady, in the four years since 
she had been "delivered," she had doubtless found that 
life is life — even though there is a great choice as to 
whom one wants to live it out with, and how. 

About this time the veteran was encouraged to tell a few 
of his 1870 experiences, and I felt as my grandchildren, 
if I ever have any, will feel when the veterans of 191 8 
will tell what they did "single-handed in the trenches," 
or how, "as the only man left of their regiment," they 
had held back the invaders, or how they hid in a barn 
and let them go by and then gave the alarm, "and a 
whole battalion had to surrender," or what know I? 
Politely, but without eagerness, I listened, the 1870 
veterans almost "spoiling the war" for me, with their 
eternal illustration of the flatness of not dying on the 
battlefield. I tried to bring the conversation back to 
1918 — leaving a rather long and not very clear account 
of how he kept his ancient, beloved, red kepi under glass, 
or next his heart, or pressed in an album, I rather forget 
which. I wanted to hear the story of the famous entry 
of the Pantalons Rouges into Masevaux on August 7, 
1 91 4, where they have been ever since, though now 
changed into this celestial blue, which decorates the 
earth (as I have frequently said, and doubtless will 
again) as never before has it been decorated by any 
men of any age or any war. Pictures of "La Guerre en 
Dentelles," or gallooned and be-caped and be-frogged 
officers with lances or drawn swords on horseback, 
charging the enemy in the typical poses of Lasalle, or 
"La Vieille Garde," or Wellington or Blucher at Water- 
loo, or anything else that ever was, are dull beside the 
strange, appealing beauty of the blue battalions of the 
twentieth century. 

76 



HOUSES OF THE CHANOINESSES 

I listened to Madame Chagu6 telling of the glad 
reception of those who entered Masevaux on that 7 th 
of August, houses and hearts flung wide open, how every- 
where the upper windows were crowded with women 
and children leaning out to see them come over the 
dark mountains and along the bright roads. Many 
left that same night, as they did from Thann and 
Bitschwiller and IMoosch and all the towns about, 
marching on to IMulliouse, which they took only to be 
driven out, and since then many red-trousered ghosts 
walk the otherwise unmystical, industrial streets of Mul- 
house. Three weeks later Mulhouse was again entered, 
and again, with many losses, other red pantaloons were 
driven out, since which the chimneys of Mulhoase have 
smoked a German smoke to a German heaven. 

Madame Chague is very Catholic, too, and bristles at 
the bare idea of any government, even the "Tiger's," 
taking liberties with the ancient faith. They want a 
bishop of their own, an Alsatian shepherd — "faut pas 
710 MS hoiisculer dans nos petite s habitudes'' — she kept 
repeating. I wondered what the Tiger and all the imita- 
tion tigers would say when they come to learn just how 
they feel here. There's the most Gordian of knots 
awaiting them, for it appears that the Germans gave 
three thousand marks a year to each cure, and the 
French government, less enamoured of the ministers of 
God, doesn't give any. However, that is only one of a 
series of knots on a very long string, and patient and 
very deft fingers will be needed for the untying. 

In each of these comfortable houses authentic ances- 
tors look from the walls, ancestors who knew the Thirty 
Years' War, or the Napoleonic campaigns, or 1870, or 
ancestors-to-be who have seen the World War. And all 
the dwellers of these large-roomed, high-roofed, deep- 
windowed houses, having been delivered, in turn deliver 
themselves of their sensations, thoughts, emotions, acts, 

77 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

on being delivered. One might, I dimly foresaw, do to 
one's breast what the wedding guest did to his when he 
heard the loud bassoon. That I may not seem unkind, 
I want to say another last word about the veterans, the 
so often toothless, bent, sightless, forgetful veterans. 
They would be all right in themselves, if they weren't so 
horribly illustrative. They seem to be saying all the 
time, "If Mortality doesn't get you one way, it does 
another," till you think that short agony on the battle- 
field, and long glory, are greatly preferable to decay 
and no glory. And no veteran will keep this my little 
book on the table by his bed. He would know, too 
well, that I am right. 

Later, as I slipped across the cobbly square to my 
house, and mounted the broad oaken stairway to my 
room, a feeling of nostalgia possessed me at the thought 
of leaving Alsace, to which but a few short days before 
I had seemed so unrelated. This bit of French history 
in the making, molded by the men of the grave, kind 
eyes, whose comradery with one another is so unfailing 
and whose courtesy to me is so exquisite, had become 
dear to me, and, too, I was looking on something that 
would never be again. The web was shifting, other 
figures were to be woven in it. Fate was to pull new 
things as well as old out from its storehouse and proceed 
with its endless combinations. Masevaux, capital of 
Alsace Reconquered, would be overshadowed by Stras- 
bourg, by Metz, by Colmar, by Mulhouse. But it will 
have had again a little day, which is all an individual 
or a town can reasonably ask, standing under the change- 
less stars. 

As I went to the popote, low over the houses stretched 
the Great Bear, so vast, so splendid, that it seemed 
almost alone in a heaven growing misty towaid its 
edges, though Alcor, the Starry Horseman, was twinkling 
strangely bright close to Mizar. But the autumnal 

78 



HOUSES OF THE CHANOINESSES 

stars hanging over the rich-colored hills of Alsace have 
not the brilHancy of those that I saw above the gray- 
white Chalons plain, that late, red October of 191 7. 

After dinner Commandant Poulet drew on my map 
the boundaries of Alsace Reconquise, as it is now, this 
fourth day of November. But as he drew I knew he 
was feeling that it was a fleeting, vanishing thing he 
was recording, for he stopped a moment, as a man might 
stop following a wind or tracing a line in water. 

Then as we sat, some half-dozen of us, about the din- 
ing-table, under the hard light of the Oberforster's 
chandelier, the commandant, flicking his cigar ash into 
the Oberforster's dreadful ash-receiver, told me something 
of the history of the Mission, which is briefly this. 

Though French troops entered the valleys of the 
Doller, the Thur, and the Largue on the 7th of 
August, 1 9 14, the French administration of that little 
triangle of Alsace Reconquered, as I found it, was or- 
ganized only in November of the same year. Its first 
form was purely military, the authorities responsible 
for the civil population being also in command of the 
military operations, the final word in all that concerned 
Alsace coming from the general in command of the 
Seventh Army, in whose sector it was. These were 
successively Generals de Maud'huy, Villaret, Debeney, 
and de Boissaudy. The little triangle was first divided 
into two territories only, that of the valley of the Largue, 
with Dannemarie as its capital, that of the valley of the 
Thur with Thann as capital. Masevaux at that time 
did not form a distinct territory, but was an annex, as it 
were, of Thann, as also was St.-Amarin. 

The officers administering the territories vv^^ere chosen 
mostly from the reserve — men whose former avocations 
had prepared them for the various rdles they were to 
fill in Alsace. They were members of the Conseil d'Etat, 
of the Cour des Comptes, magistrates. Gardes des Forets 

79 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

et des Eaux, together with many others belonging to 
technical professions. The first Capitaine Adminis- 
trateur was Captain Heurtel, in civil life Maitre des 
Requetes au Conseil d'Etat. Though seriously wounded 
at the very beginning of the war, in December of 19 14, 
he asked to be again sent to the front. He met his 
death at Verdun in 191 6. His successor was Com- 
mandant Poulet, Conseiller d'Etat, who took up office 
on Christmas Day, 1914. 

In July, 191 7, the Mission was detached from the 
General Headquarters and placed under the Ministry 
of War. Its new name, expressive of enlarged activities, 
was changed to Mission Militaire Administrative en Alsace 
(Military Administrative Mission in Alsace) , the central 
office being transferred to Masevaux, which Fate had 
placed half-way between St.-Amarin at one end of the 
reconquered triangle and Dannemarie at the other. 

Ever since, in and out of the building of the German 
Komniandantur, once the nave of the old Abbey, men 
clad in horizon-blue have been coming and going, busied 
about affairs after the French way, the ancient town of 
Masevaux entering into the unexpected enjoyment of 
what might be called an Indian summer. Nothing else 
has happened to it, so far as I can see, since the Revolu- 
tion, when the Chapter was suppressed and the Goddess 
Reason briefly installed in the Abbey. And Masevaux 
loves and cherishes its brief glory as only lovely and 
transient things are loved and cherished.^ 



^ After the signing of the armistice and the French occupation of the 
two provinces in their entirety, another reorganization became necessary. 
To each of the three divisions of Alsace-Lorraine was sent a Commissaire 
de la Repuhlique — the Commandant (I had ahnost said my Commandant) 
Poulet was given charge of Upper Alsace with residence in the ancient 
and comely town of Colmar. To Lower Alsace with residence at Stras- 
bourg was appointed M. le Conseiller d'Etat Maringer with the title of 
High Commissioner, and to M. Mirman, the celebrated Mayor of Nancy, 
was given Lorraine with residence at Metz. 

80 



VIII 

LUNCHEON AT BITSCHWILLER. THE MISSION IN 
RESIDENCE AT ST.-AMARIN. SAINT-ODILE 

ATOVEMBER ^th. — Awakened early, early by the 
■*■ ' sound of heavy firing. Later, looking out of the 
square, I see the market in full swing. Against the inn of 
Les Lions d'Or, with its comfortable courtyard and two 
red wings, stands a wagon-load of hay with a pale-green 
cover thrown over it. Carts of cabbages and carrots, 
drawn by white oxen, are pulled up under the yellowing 
trees. The black of the clothes of the women making their 
purchases cuts in very hard. Blue-clad men come and go ; 
several motors are standing before the door of the 
Administration. The shining, diffused light of the mist- 
hidden sun rounds every corner and fills up every space 
with a pleasant softness. 

At eleven I start out with the commandant, Captain 
Serin, and Lieutenant Laferriere to motor to Thann 
through a world of rust and green and gold-colored 
hills, under the whitest of heavens. So soft and shining 
is the beauty of the lovely earth, and so soon to pass 
into the winter, that I say to the commandant how like 
the transient beauty of a woman of forty-five are these 
delicate, hazy hills with their cashmere shawls still 
twisted about their shoulders, drawn up over their 
heads, dropping down to their green-valleyed feet. I 
mean the woman of forty-five who is still loved. 

Again we stopped on the crest between the valleys 
of Masevaux and of Thann, and again we stopped and 

8z 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

peered through the wire-and-pine screen, out toward 
Mulhouse and the Rhine and the Black Forest. The 
valley was blue and shining. Even the windows of the 
great, white building of the Idioten-Anstalt, where the 
Germans are bivouacked, were visible. Beyond were 
the high towers of their potassium-works. As those 
three men stood looking out over the rich plain I thought, 
"Always will I remember the ofhcers of the Mission like 
that, standing on the heights, shading their eyes with 
their hands as they looked down into the land of Egypt, 
wherein the Lord was to lead them. ..." 

New shell-holes were all about us, and there was a 
sharp, continual reverberation of cannon among the 
cashmere-shawled hills. 

At Thann we stopped for a moment by the fountain 
near the church (in peace-times, the old statue of St.- 
Theobald that I saw at Sewen surmounts the charming 
column), the commandant having been saluted by a 
young American officer, leading by the hand a little girl 
of seven or eight, in Alsatian costume — huge black bow, 
black velvet bodice, full white skirts. He was quite 
simply a young man whose parents had gone to America, 
he himself had fought on the Mexican border, got his 
commission, and was proudly — oh, so proudly and so 
smilingly — walking his native streets of Thann with his 
little niece. 

We are en route to lunch with M. and Madame Gal- 
land, at Bitschwiller, who receive us as agreeable people 
of the world receive their guests in all quarters of the 
globe. They were of those who could have gone, yet 
remained, during the many bombardments of the town — 
noblesse oblige, and have been a blessing to the valley. 

Madame Galland, Vv^ith powdered hair, slender, 
delicate of feature and of form, dressing older than she 
is, might have looked out of a Latour pastel. M. Gal- 
land, too, is fine-featured, well groomed, agreeable, and 

82 




[See page 38 



THANN. THE CATHEDRAL PORTAL 



BITSCHWILLER— ST.-AMARIN-ST.-ODILE 

there was a handsome daughter with a quietly sorrowful 
expression on her young face. It is a house from every 
one of whose many wide windows one saw gold leaves 
hanging on black branches, behind them warm, rust- 
colored hills, traced with pale-yellow larches and stamped 
with black patterns of pine. Within, the rooms were 
beautiful with blue-clad men. There was an agreeable 
and suave odor of kindness and unstintingness about 
the house, mingling with that of the ease of people of the 
world, and the surety of those in authority, altogether a 
good house. Eight or ten officers besides ourselves sat 
down to the usual delicious and abundant Alsatian 
luncheon, the conversation intimate enough to have 
color, general enough not to exclude the stranger within 
the gates. And it ran after this way, beginning with 
accounts of that last day of July, 19 14, when Kriegs- 
gcfahrzu stand had been proclaimed in the valley and 
they were completely cut off from the outer world, 
witnessing only the sinister passing and repassing of 
regiments of dragoons and detachments of artillery. 
M. Galland had procured all the flour and dried vege- 
tables possible at Mulhouse to ration the population of 
Bitschwiller in case of need, and collected what money 
he could. The days passed in suspense, till the 6th 
of August, when they remarked much coming and going 
of troops; on the 7th the German cavalry was seen 
beating a hasty retreat. 

A Brigadier de Chasseurs, mounted on a great black 
horse, is the first Frenchman they see, advancing alone, 
looking slowly about him, his revolver in his hands, 
fearing some snare. Then the Pantalons Rouges pour 
into the valley, flowers at every bayonet and in every 
tunic, and the Gallands receive the first French general 
to enter Alsace since 1870, General Superbie, command- 
ing the 41st Brigade. At two o'clock, after refreshments 
had been offered from every house, the regiment took 

83 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

the road to Mulhouse, where that same night many of 
them had their "rendezvous with death." 

The talk then fell on that mysterious thing called 
luck, and how the soldier must have it, be changard, if 
he were to come through, and of generals who, like 
General Liautey, wouldn't have tinder them any save 
notoriously lucky officers. And there was much heedless 
joking (with the Fates perhaps listening). I, who never 
say even within myself, "I will do thus and so, " without 
adding "if God will," remarked at last, propitiatingly, 
that "'twas somewhat difficult to tell beforehand who 
was going to be lucky." 

"But for military purposes," dryly remarked an officer 
who had not yet spoken, "one needs to be lucky only 
as long as the war lasts," which being hideously true, 
we turned to the less elusive subject of the rich and easy 
living of the peasants in this part of the world since the 
war, and how they, even like unto those other tens of 
thousands of "war-workers," will "miss" it. They had 
become accustomed to the troops, and there was the 
thrice blessed popote in which they more or less shared. 
And when the Americans came things were still better 
in a still better world. For they were very free with 
their money (though no one could understand a word 
that they said), and then they went, and the French 
troops came again, and there was something very 
pleasant about their return. Though they didn't have 
the money of the Americans, they could be conversed 
with and they would lend a hand in the garden, and 
were always joking with the children, and helped with 
the crops, and the virtues of the Americans, if not their 
money, were somewhat forgotten. They were, in 
places, even remembered as a nuisance, wanting every- 
thing cleared up, stupid bores about the dung-heap, 
"and will you believe it. Monsieur," one of them said 
to Laferri^re, "they even washed their dishes with 

84 



BITSCHWILLER— ST.-AMARIN— ST.-ODILE 

soap, and you couldn't give the dishwater to the 
pigs!" 

After which I related Colonel Bumside's "best short 
story," also concerning the peasant point of view. 
When he was in Lorraine with his men, at the well- 
named watery (not watering) place called Demanges- 
aux-Eaux, a delegation of villagers waited on him, 
with the complaint that the Americans made so much 
noise at night that the sheep couldn't sleep! 

And we finished luncheon gaily, to the rather distant 
sound of German guns, with the story of the wife of a 
(or probably the) French soap manufacturer in Tonquin 
who came to the Gallands' for convalescence after "war- 
strain." How she charmed them with her singing, 
especially of children's songs, delighted them with the 
reserve and modesty of her conduct, and after two 
months turned out to have been once a well-known, 
cafe-chantant singer with the proverbial "past and many 
brilliant presents," enjoying a glimpse of home-life in 
Alsace. 

Coffee was poured by the handsome daughter, who 
with her firm yet delicate profile, and rich, dark hair 
drawn heavily back, looked like some model for a head 
on a bank-note or medallion. Her mother, saying to 
me, "Vous etes femme de cceur," took me apart and told 
me her history. 

And perhaps because so much had been buried in the 
great war of youthful love and hope, I may record a 
Httle of this story; its grief is typical in simplicity and 
purity of many countless thousands in this land of 
France. 

For months she had been beloved by a handsome 
young chasseur stationed with his regiment at Bitschwil- 
ler, one of many officers to frequent the hospitable 
house of the Gallands. His photograph on a table 
shows him tall, broad-shouldered, straight-eyed, kind- 

85 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

mouthed. On account of the uncertainties of his life 
he did not declare himself while there, but immediately 
afterward, doubtless because of some presentiment, he 
wrote to the mother telling of his love. This was found 
to be returned and they became fiances. 

A few weeks after he was killed in Flanders, in one 
of the Mont Kemmel combats, a ball striking him 
in the forehead as he leaped from a trench to lead a 
counter-attack. 

He was one of ten sons. Six of his brothers had fallen, 
too. Awed, I asked concerning her who had borne 
them, but she had gone to her grave long before the 
World War; though I knew her not, thinking of the 
mother of the Maccabees, and many like her, I 
thanked God that those seven wounds had been 
spared a mother's heart. Then we returned to the 
young girl's story. 

"But never to have looked into each other's eyes 
and exchanged the glance of love," I said, "it's a 
shadowy and heavy grief for her youth to bear. Would 
it not have been better for them to have been united?' 

The mother answered, after a pause, "There was no 
time." 

"But this can't be the end for her; she's only begin- 
ning life!" I said, and thought of the great, sorrowing 
hosts of these young widows of the heart alone, and 
of the vexed question in their families, as to whether it 
was better to become a widow or remain a maid. 

"She said to me only the other day, 'I have all that 
I need for my whole life.' " 

"She will find that the heart is not like that," I cried; 
"it doesn't seem able to content itself even with the 
sweetest and holiest things of memory. It's forever 
reaching out." 

For a moment we stood with clasped hands, looking 
out to the hills whence despair had so often come, and 

86 



BITSCHWILLER— ST.-AMARIN— ST.-ODILE 

Madame Galland added, quite simply, "Fifty thousand 
sleep around about us." 

For one of the many-colored hills, pressing close to 
the broad windows of the salons, separated us from the 
Molkenrain and the sacramental Hartmannswillerkopf. 

In the nearest, that rises without any perspective 
immediately from the house, is an old quarry, and it 
is there that since four years the workers in M. Gal- 
land's factory are sheltered during the frequent bom- 
bardments of the town, for in what once was used 
for constructing spinning-machines eleven million shells 
have been turned out, all of which is quite well known 
to the enemy. 

The pleasant odor of the house followed us to the 
motor and even as we rolled swiftly down the valley 
of the Thur, past Moosch, against whose hill, still like a 
picture tilted back, lies the military cemetery, cut out 
of the rust and gold-colored hill, with its black splashes 
of pines. Again peace to those who lie there. 

Everywhere negro troops, sitting, standing, leaning, 
lying (a good deal of leaning and lying). An occasional 
forlorn-looking w^hite officer. It is the same Fifteenth 
New York Infantry. 

"I am told they were all, before they were drafted, 
lift-boys and newsboys and bootblacks and railway-car 
porters," said one of the ofificers. 

"You mustn't class these last with the others. You 
don't know the majesty and authority of the Pullman- 
car porter. He's as final as the Germans think the 
Fourteen Points are," I answered. 

I had felt myself somewhat exotic when I arrived in 
Masevaux; but I'm blotted into the landscape, one 
with Alsace, compared to these sons of Ham, clad in 
khaki, Vv^ho fill the blue-and-gold valley of the Thur. 

Then we roll into the long street of the village of St.- 
Amarin, named after the saint to whom a saint friend 

87 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

said, upon seeing him about to make himself scarce at 
the approach of assassins, ' ' Ij you miss this opportunity 
jor martyrdom, you may never get another!'' (It all 
depends on what you want and what your friends can 
do for you, and it isn't a bit like politics.) But I'll tell 
the story of St.-Amarin another time. 

The town that bears his name is long and ram- 
bling. There is a pink church tower surmounted by 
a slate-roofed top, shaped something like a turban 
with a point like those on helmets, and there is the 
fountain bearing the date 1830, and on its column is 
perched the Gallic cock, and it is the pride of the 
long street and vies with the church square as a 
meeting-place. 

But this is 1 918 and the commandant, who loves St.- 
Amarin, as I can see by the gentle, almost affectionate 
way he looks about, shows me first the cinematograph, 
in a sort of club for soldiers. It has been a Mecca of 
warmth and comfort since three years for those coming 
down from frozen mountain-sides. Pictures by George 
Scott (good pictures) decorate it, and fancy is unbridled 
where the enemy is concerned. 

The Crown Prince is represented in a loge with a 
voluptuous actress twice his size, and, furthermore, the 
artist, not content with mere paint and canvas, has 
given him real wooden legs which dangle from the 

painted sides of the painted loge. The Prince of said 

to an officer showing him about, "And even so you have 
flattered my cousin." 

Franz Joseph, shrunken by years, is represented hud- 
dled up in another loge, with another actress, but it 
didn't strike me as funny, nor did it recall in any way 
the tales of his very unspectacular friendship with the 
faithful Kathe Schratt. 

A little way down the street is the pleasant officers' 
club, with books and papers, deep chairs and long 

88 



BITSCHWILLER— ST.-AMARIN— ST.-ODILE 

divans. I dwell a little on the comfort of it all, thinking 
what it has meant to half or entirely frozen men coming 
down from those relentless winter heights. 

Then we go to the Bureaux de I'Administration across 
the way, which had been the headquarters of the * ' Mis- 
sion Militaire d' Alsace" until it was transferred to 
Masevaux a year ago. 

It, too, is in what was once the Oberforster's house, 
only its walls had been hung by the commandant with 
ancient souvenirs picked up in the valley; old engrav- 
ings of Alsatian generals, Rapp, Kleber, and Lefevre, 
Duke of Dantzig, this last vanquished husband of 
Madame Sans-Gene as well as victorious general of 
France. And there are some old engravings of the 
portals of the church at Thann, and i860 street scenes, 
with bombazined women and high-collared men. An 
enormous flag of Louis Philippe decorates one corner, 
and many horns and antlers of the Oberforster's time 
hang in the entrance-hall. There is a busy, pleasant 
coming and going of men who like their work. 

More officers are presented, and there is much joking 
about our Masevaux popote and odious comparisons. 
We tell them proudly of the new coffee-pot, but the 
haughty chef of the St.-Amarin popote answers that it 
was needed, and probably we had at last heard what 
people really thought about the coffee at the Masevaux 
mess. I am to limch here on Thursday and see — or 
rather, taste! 

And all love St.-Amarin and its wide valley, even 
those who now live at Masevaux. 

Home by the Route Joffre with S6rin and Laferri^re. 
A rising up over indigo mountains, blackening at their 
base, blotted against the strange white sky, white even 
now at sunset, then a drop into the dark valley of 
Masevaux, talking of politics, theirs and mine, things 
of wisdom and valiance done or undone. And the end 

89 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

in sight. Though Laferriere said: "I am not sure that 
they will feel so conquered. They will proudly record 
the dates of their great victories, and their historians 
will tell of their sweeping invasions; one must confess 
they have had great generals. They will doubtless 
reproach their statesmen with not having made better 
alliances, and decry their gaffes. But as for fighting, 
they will feel that men may fight one to two, one to 
three or to four or even five, but that no one can fight 
the world. Tenez, for Napoleon, after Waterloo, there 
was nothing more personally, but his victories remain 
among the great military glories of history." On the 
crest as we started to drop into the valley, in that pale, 
pale sky above a blue, blue hill, something almost like 
words was written in delicate gold, in long looping 
characters, by the unseen, setting sun. I know not 
what they spelled, but I think it was Peace, lovely 
Peace. . . . 

Thinking my day fairly over, I had just taken off 
my things and lain me down when word was brought 
up that Captain Bernard was waiting for me. Put on 
my hat in total blackness, the electric light again out 
all over Masevaux, my candle snuffed, and in a darkness 
which conceals the whereabouts of the match-box, as 
well as minor accessories like gloves and veil, I depart 
to take tea at another large manufacturer's, where T find 
more handsome girls of the coming generation. Deli- 
cious little bobbin-shaped doughnuts, called shankeU, are 
served with tea, and there was brought out a great 
tricolor flag whose staff was surmounted with the eagle 
of Napoleon IIL It was of matchless, uncrushable 
silk, dipped in unfading dyes. After Sedan, like many 
and many another, it had been put in a long box and 
nailed against the beams in the attic, remaining so 
hidden until the visit of President Poincare in the 
winter of 1915. 

90 



BITSCHWILLER— ST.-AMARIN— ST.-ODILE 

Then home through black and muddy streets, full of 
hurrying, stumbling forms. Later the cheerful popote. 

And then before I went to sleep I read again the story 
of Saint-Odile according to Edouard Schur6, and it runs 
somewhat like this : ^ 

At the end of the seventh century a powerful Frank of 
the Rhine Valley, Atalric, was named Duke of Alsace by 
Childeric II, one of the last of the Merovingian kings. 

He was like many of his kind, fierce and implacable, 
worshiping neither pagan divinities nor the one God. 

He dwelt in a great castle near the town of Obernay 
in the Vosges, and here one day he received the visit 
of an Irish monk and gave him shelter, according to the 
custom of the time. 

Thinking to improve the opportunity, the duke said 
to him: 

"Those who wear the priestly garb boast of miraculous 
powers. If that be true, demand of thy God that my 
wife Bereswinde, now with child, bear me a son and 
heir." 

At that the monk threw himself on his knees, remain- 
ing long in prayer in spite of Atalric's impatience. 

When at last the holy man arose, he said : 

"No one can change the will of Heaven. Thy wife 
will bring forth a daughter, and thy life will be one 
long struggle with her. But in the end the dove will 
vanquish the lion." 

Atalric's first thought was to have the unpleasant 
prophet well flogged, but he finally contented himself 
by chasing him from the castle to the accompaniment 
of his choicest maledictions. 

When, a few days later, the gentle Bereswinde in fear 
and trembling (her lord having made no secret of what 
he expected) gave birth to a blind daughter, such a 
rage possessed Atalric that the dwellers in the castle 

^ Edouard Schur^, L' Alsace Fran^aise, RSves et Combats. 
7 91 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

thought their last hour had come. Bereswinde's feelings 
are not recorded. The duke declared loudly that he 
did not intend to endure such dishonor, and that if the 
child were not promptly hidden he would with his own 
hands make away with it. 

Fortunately Bereswinde had a sister who was abbess 
of the Convent of Baume-les-Dames in Burgundy. To 
her the child was sent, and the legend has it that 
Odile recovered her sight at the touch of the baptismal 
waters, thus symbolizing the opening of her eyes to 
spiritual light in the darkness of a barbarian age. 

She was tenderly reared by the abbess, who, however, 
told her nothing of her princely birth, letting her think 
she was the child of parents killed in war, though, as 
she grew in years and beauty, she was treated as a 
princess; her charm and gentleness were so great that 
it was recorded that birds and even deer would eat from 
her hands as she wandered in the forest clearings. Often 
at night in her cell she had strange and beautiful visions. 
The most frequent was that of an angel of shining though 
severe visage, who would appear presenting her now 
with roses, now with lilies, the perfume enfolding her 
as if in some heavenly felicity. But once as day was 
about to break she had quite a different vision. It 
was that of a proud and beautiful adolescent who wore, 
as did the Prankish lords of the times, a gray tunic with 
a leathern girdle, while his golden hair fell freely about 
his shoulders. His long sword was suspended from a 
strap decorated with shining plaques of gold. The 
purple border of his tunic showed him indeed to be a 
prince, and in his mien there was both pride and gentle- 
ness. 

Odile' s heart leaped up and she was about to address 
him when suddenly he vanished, and the angel of the 
austere visage took his place, holding out a cross of 
ebony on which hung an ivory Christ. The next night, 

92 



BITSCHWILLER— ST.-AMARIN— ST.-ODILE 

and many after, the young lord returned. At last he 
came carrying in his hands a crown of gold. Odile was 
about to grasp it, when the angel, graver and sterner 
than before, stepped between them and presented to 
Odile a jeweled chalice. Thinking she was to partake 
of the Saving Host, Odile pressed it to her lips. What 
was her horror when she found it filled with blood still 
hot and throbbing. So great was her trouble that on 
awalvening she recounted her dream to the abbess, 
who then revealed to her the secret of her birth. How 
her gentle mother, worn by the harsh tempers of the 
duke, was long since dead, and her father had sworn 
never to look upon her face. The image in the dream 
was that of her young brother, Adalbert, bom after her, 
and heir to the duchy. "But," added the abbess, 
"beware of seeking out thy fierce father; thy mother is 
no longer there to defend thee. Stay rather here, for 
thou art destined at my death to become abbess of this 
convent." 

But Odile was so deeply moved by this glimpse of 
the glory of her race and the promise of fraternal love 
that she could not resist the desire to contemplate with 
her earthly eyes the brother whose image had so en- 
chanted her, to enfold him, if even for a single time, in 
her arms. By a faithful servitor she despatched a letter 
to him, saying in it: "I am Odile, thine unknown 
sister. If thou lovest me as I thee, obtain from my 
father that I enter into my daughterly estate. I salute 
thee tenderly. At thought of thee my heart blossoms 
Hke a hly in the desert." 

This letter acted as a charm upon Adalbert, awaking 
in his youthful heart all generous and romantic senti- 
ments. He cried, "Who is this sister whose words 
are sweeter than those of a betrothed?" 

A tender desire seized him to make her his companion 
and coheir and to give her back her rank and family 

93 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

estate. He answered, "Trust but in me. I will arrange 
all things for the best." 

Shortly after, while his father was absent at the chase, 
he sent to Baume-les-Dames a splendid chariot drawn 
by six richly caparisoned horses. With it went a numer- 
ous retinue, that Odile might return to her father's 
house in a way befitting her estate. And now begins 
the tragedy. 

Atalric is in the banquet-hall of his castle of Obemay, 
where his birthday is being celebrated with great pomp 
and circumstance. It is the day, too, that he has 
chosen to present his son and heir to his vassals. About 
the tables, groaning under the weight of gold and silver 
dishes, his many courtiers are sitting, drinking from 
great horns of aurochs or clanking their burnished 
hanaps. Atalric, happening to go to the window, espies 
in the plain a chariot approaching, drawn by six horses; 
banners are flying and palms waving. Above it float 
the ducal colors. 

He cries out in surprise, "Who is it that approaches?" 

Adalbert answers with all the valiance of his young 
and trusting heart, "It is thy daughter Odile come to 
beg thy mercy." 

"Who is the dolt that counseled her return?" 

"It is I who called her, and on this day of thy feast 
I beg thy grace for her." 

"How has she, who desires my death, been able to 
bewitch you?" cries Atalric, pale and stiff with anger. 

Adalbert protests, invoking his father's pity, the 
honor of the family, and his own brotherly love, but 
Atalric, beside himself, commands the youth to cast his 
sister from the threshold. Adalbert refuses. 

"If it must be done, do it thyself," he answers, proudly. 
Upon this the duke menaces his son with disinheritance 
if he does not immediately obey. But Adalbert, draw- 
ing his sword, lays it at his father's feet, telling him 

94 



BITSCHWILLER— ST.-AMARIN— ST.-ODILE 

that rather than fail in fraternal love he will give up hiv^ 
heritage. This fills his father with so blind a fury 
that he gives his son a great blow upon the temple 
with the hilt of his sword. 

The stroke is mortal, and Adalbert falls to the ground. 
The vassals crowd in fear at one end of the great hall, 
while Atalric stands alone, petrified by the horror of 
his crime. 

At this moment in the fullness of her young beauty, 
dressed as a bride for her nuptials, Odile enters the hall. 
A single look suffices. She gives a great cry and throws 
herself on her knees by her dying brother. She clasps 
his bleeding head, she kisses his glazing eyes, and in that 
single kiss, that one despairing embrace, the pain of the 
whole world transpierces her gentle breast. It is the 
chalice of blood the angel once put to her lips. The 
dreadful crime of her father, the loss of her adored 
brother, to whom she had been mystically united by a 
more than fraternal bond, turn all her desires to the 
other world; the first young innocent love of family 
is changed into solicitude for all who are suffering in 
that barbarian world. Her novitiate begins. 

Atalric, devoured by remorse, though still impenitent, 
did not dare cast his daughter out, but he spoke no 
word to her, harboring always in his heart the prediction 
of the Irish monk, "The dove will overcome the lion." 

In order to avoid him, Odile spent her days mostly 
in the great forests that surrounded the castle, often 
climbing to the heights of Altitona. Under the shadow 
of those great trees, high as the nave of some cathedral, 
she no longer heard the striking of the hours of human 
time. All things appeared to her under the guise of 
eternity. Her beautiful brother, her unique love, was 
dead, almost as a martyr. Why should she not in 
turn gather for herself a palm like to that he carried as 
he roamed the heavenly fields ? 

95 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

One day, as she was deeply meditating these things, 
she found herself midway up the great hill, when, 
enveloped in a blinding light, the angel of her dreams 
in the convent of Burgundy suddenly appeared. His 
wings, touched with glory, were widely unfolded, and his 
face shone like the sun. With an imperious yet pro- 
tecting gesture he pointed to the top of the mountain, 
where were seen the crumbling remains of a Roman 
camp, saying to her soul, "There, Odile, is thy home; 
there shalt thou dwell and gather to thee others whose 
thoughts are holy and whose wills are bent to service." 

Odile remained long in ecstasy. When she had recov- 
ered her fleshly sight the angel was gone, but she had 
understood. On the heights of Altitona she was to 
build a sanctuary which should be a refuge of peace, 
a fortress of prayer, a citadel of God. It was vocation. 

Strangely increased in beauty, she returned at night- 
fall to the castle, and this added beauty was observed 
by all. 

Shortly after Atalric, through pride and also to get 
rid of her, conceived the design of marrying her to a great 
Austrasian lord from Metz, then his guest, who had 
been struck by love for her. He called her to him, and 
told her his intention. She answered gently: 

"Father, thou canst not give me to any man. Thou 
knowest I am vowed to Christ alone." 

The duke, enraged at her resistance, but grown some- 
what wary by experience, sought out a docile monk 
and commanded him to impress upon Odile the wisdom 
of obedience, by which she might placate him and even 
win his heart. But all was in vain. Then he con- 
ceived the black idea of delivering his daughter by 
force into the arms of the Austrasian lord, thinking, once 
she had been embraced by the lover, she would con- 
sent to marriage. He sent two armed men to seize her 
in a grotto where she was accustomed to pray. Hard- 

96 



BITSCHWILLER— ST.-AMARIN— ST.-ODILE 

ened by the fierce design that filled his heart, he cried 
out when she was brought before him, "The Lord of 
Austrasia awaits thee for betrothal; willingly or unwill- 
ingly thou shalt be his." 

Odile, knowing the supreme moment had come, an- 
swered: "Thou hast already killed thy son. Wouldst 
thou also cause the death of thy daughter? If thou 
bindest me to the arms of this man I will not survive 
my shame, but I will kill myself. Thus thou wilt be 
the cause not only of the death of my body, but of my 
soul as well, and thou wilt thyself be destined to eternal 
damnation." 

"Little care I for the other world. In this I am and 
will remain the master." 

"That in truth thou art," she answered, gently, "but 
listen to me and recognize the goodness of my God. 
Allow me instead to build a sanctuary upon the heights 
of Altitona; thou wilt thus be delivered from me for 
all time. There I, and those gathered with me, will 
pray for thee. I feel a strange power within me." 

Atalric made a violent gesture, but she continued 
without flinching, "Menace me, trample me under- 
foot, but tremble before this image," and she took from 
her bosom the ivory Christ hanging from the ebon cross. 

In that moment, as father and daughter faced each 
other, the powers of heaven and hell, of spiritual promise 
and unregenerate will, were arrayed in combat. But 
Atalric did not at first give way. Suddenly, however, 
the countenance of Odile became more terrible than 
that of a warrior, and her whole mien was wrapped in an 
angelic majesty. In her dilated eyes Atalric thought 
for an instant that he saw the bleeding image of his 
murdered son. An intolerable pain filled his heart, 
and he cried out under the irresistible pressure of the 
heavenly will: "Thou hast conquered. Do as thou wilt, 
but never let me look upon thy face." 

97 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

"Thou wilt see me in the other life," answered his 
child. 

The legend adds that Atalric, regretting his moment 
of weakness, did not immediately renounce his evil i 
designs. Odile was obliged to flee before his increasing 
wrath and was pursued by him and the Austrasian 
lord, accompanied by many armed men, even beyond 
the Rhine. 

But at the moment when they were about to seize 
her, at the foot of a mountain where there seemed no 
issue, the rock parted suddenly and received her. A 
few minutes later it again opened and Odile appeared 
enveloped in a supernatural light, declaring to her 
awestruck pursuers that she belonged forever to Christ 
alone. Then Atalric and the Austrasian lord turned 
silently and left the spot. The dove had conquered the 
Hon. 

The legend has transformed her father's momentary 
conversion to her will into the physical image of the 
suddenly sundered rock. But in the end it is all the 
same, for Odile, Vierge Candide et Forte, represents 
forever the victory of the transfigured soul over brute 
force, the incalculable power of faith sealed by sacrifice, 
the saving breath of the invisible world breathed into 
the visible. 

During centuries the great Benedictine Convent of 
Mount Saint-Odile (Odilienberg) performed its works of 
faith and mansuetude in that barbarian and ruthless 
world; the voices of Taran, the God of War, and of 
Rosmertha, the Goddess of Life and Love, according 
to the pagan ways, were replaced by another, promising 
eternal felicities to those bom again in Christ. 

From a wall of grds rose, this same grds rose that I 
have found as building-stone for temple and home and 
fountain all over Alsace, Odile, needing one day to give 
instant refreshment to an old man spent with fatigue, 

98 



BITSCHWILLER— ST.-AMARIN— ST.-ODILE 

caused the spring of crystal water to gush forth from 
which pilgrims still drink. And in the Chajjel, called 
that of Tears, is a deeply indented stone, worn, it is said, 
by the knees of the saint as she knelt there praying for 
the release of the soul of her father (long dead and 
unpenitent) from the pains of purgatory. The legend 
has it that only toward the end of her life was she able 
to accomplish this, when at last the chalice of blood the 
angel once gave her was transmuted into an elixir of 
eternal Ufe. 

The redemption of the soul of Atalric signifies, too, 
the conversion of the Merovingian world to Chris- 
tianity, and to a new will to give up life that it might 
be found again — and many other things that it is diffi- 
cult to tell of in words, but the soul can perceive them. 

And on the Odilienberg has beat for centuries the very 
heart, as it were, of Alsace; above its throb being laid, 
passionately, now a hand from the West, now one from 
the East. . . . 

To this day, they who at evening ascend its heights 
and wander under the lindens of the terrace built above 
the old pagan wall, looking out upon the splendid 
panorama of the Vosges, breathe the mystical fragrance 
of the lily and the rose that perfiuned the last sigh of 
Saint-Odile. 

These things I am not able to know of myself, for 
the Odilienberg is still in German hands. 



IX 

THE "field of lies" AND LAIMBACH 

Faro come colui che piange. — Dante 

ATOVEMBER 6th. — And to-morrow I am to pass into 
•* ▼ the sweet, broad valley of the Thur and there 
dwell. I ask neither how nor why, knowing it will 
be vastly pleasant, though a somewhat startled feel- 
ing overtakes me at the thought of Jeaving Masevaux, 
tout ce qui finit est si court. For a fleeting, nostalgic 
moment I think, too, "What am I about, binding 
sheaves in this rich corner of the earth that is not 
mine?" 

As we gather for lunch, some one reads the sweeping 
clauses of the conditions of the armistice with Austria- 
Hungary. Nothing is left save hunger and disorder. 
I wonder if those to whom one of the "first aims of the 
war is the dismemberment of the Dual Monarchy" 
see, in their passion, what it will mean to surround the 
centripetal force of Germany with floating, unsteady 
bits, that inevitably will be drawn to it. Some one 
hazarded the remark, evidently not so trite as we once 
thought it, that "if Austria didn't exist, she would 
have to be invented." Passion seems more than ever 
to be its own blind end, and, looking at those men, I 
thought, have we not fought and died the good death 
for other and further ends? 

Then Laferridre began reading the American com- 
munique. We are but five miles from the Sedan-Metz 

100 



"FIELD OF LIES" AND LAIMBACH 

line, one of the principal lines of communication of the 
Germans 1 

As in a dream I listen to the deeds of my soldiers, 
recited in the most beautiful of French, as many deeds 
of many men have been recited to many women through 
the ages. 

"Ce matin la Ihre ArmSe a rcpris son attaque. En dSpit d'mie 
resistance descsperee nos troupes [americaines] out force le passage de 
la Meuse d BrieuUes et d CUry-le-Peiit." . . . 

"Beaumont, nccud de routes important, est tombS dcvant nos 
troupes victorieuses qui se sont avancSes jusqu'au Bois de I'Hospice 
a deux milks au nord de Beaumont. Au cours de leur avance elles se 
sont emparees de LStanne. A Beaumont, nous avons delivrS 500 
citoyens franqais qui ont salui nos soldats comme leurs liberateurs. . . . 

"U avance dcs deux derniers jours a amenS en certains points 
notre ligne d cinq niilles de la voie ferree Sedan-Metz, une des prin- 
cipales lignes de communication des armies allejnandes." ^ 



1 AMERICAN COMMUNIQUES 

Tuesday morning. 

This morning the First Army resumed the attack. In spite of desper- 
ate opposition our troops have forced a crossing of the Meuse at Brieulles 
and at Clery-le-Petit. They are now developing a new line in the 
heavily wooded and very diB&cult terrain on the heights east of the river 
between these two points. 

On the entire front the enemy is opposing our advance with heavy 
artillery and machine-gun fire, notwithstanding which we are making 
excellent progress. The west bank of the Meuse, as far north as opposite 
Pouilly, Ues in our hands. 

In the course of several successful raids in the Voivre, detachments of 
the Second Army have penetrated the enemy's trenches, destroying 
material, dugouts, and emplacements, and capturing prisoners. 

Tuesday evening. 

The First Army under Lieut. -Gen. Liggett has continued its success. 
Crossing the river south of Dun-sur-Meuse under a heavy artillery fire 
which frequently wrecked the new constructed bridges, the troops of 
Maj.-Gen. Hines's Corps fought their way up the slopes of the east bank. 

Breaking the enemy's strong resistance, they captured Hills 292, 260, 
Liny-devant-Dun, and drove him from the Bois de Ch&tillon. 

During the afternoon our gains in this sector were extended north- 
ward; Dun-sur-Meuse was captured and our line pushed forward a 
mile beyond that town, as far as the village of Nielly. The troops of 

loi 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

As we sit down the commandant tells me they had 
been picking all sorts of strange things out of the air 
that morning, the ether stamped with unaccustomed 
names. He had just got a message, not meant for 
French ears, bearing a new signature, Ebert; the day 
before he had got one bearing that of Scheidemann. 
It is like a further dream of a dream, these things that 
are borne "upon the sightless couriers of the air." 

At two o'clock I started out with Bernard and Lafer- 
riere, the latter on the errand of rounding up an actor in 
one of those obscure yet deadly village dramas. 

"Generally I have little to do; they know they are 
well off," he said, and we agreed that it was indeed a 
pity to be pursued by original sin even unto these 
pleasant valleys. 

We descend at Rammersmatt, a quite unsinf ul-looking 
place, and while he is gone Bernard and I visit the old 
church, beautifully held in the cleft of the hill, lying 

Maj.-Gen. Sunmerall's Corps reached the river at Cesse and Luzy and 
mopped up the forest of Jaulnay. 

The important road center of Beaumont fell before our victorious 
forces, who pushed on to the Bois de I'Hospice, two miles north of that 
town, capturing in their advance the village of L6tanne. 

At Beaumont we hberated five hundred French citizens, who welcomed 
our soldiers as deliverers. 

The advance of the past two days has carried our line to points within 
five miles of the Sedan-Metz railroad, the main line of communications 
of the German armies. Between Beaumont and Bar Maj.-Gen. 
Dickman's Corps, in close liaison with the French Foturth Army on its 
left, pushed forward under heavy artillery and machine-gun fire through 
the rugged forest areas beyond Stonne. 

The villages of Yoncq, La Basace, and Stonne were taken. 

We have taken to-day west of the Meuse 51 additional guns, making 
a total of more than 150 since November ist. 

Thirty of our bombing planes executed a successful raid on Mouzon 
and Raucourt this morning, dropping over two tons of bombs with good 
effect. Reconnaissance and pvu^suit squadrons carried out many success- 
ful missions, machine-gunning enemy troops and greatly assisting the 
advance of our troops. 

Seventeen enemy planes were shot down and two enemy balloons 
burned. Seven of our planes are missing. 

102 



"FIELD OF LIES" AND LAIMBACH 

against another hill, looking down on the plain of Cernay, 
toward the German lines. It is this same plain of 
Cernay, which I mentioned before, that was known in the 
old days as the "Champ de Mensonges." There Ario- 
vistus was defeated by Caesar. There, too, Louis le 
Debonnaire was attacked by his three sons and betrayed 
by his army, and ever since it has been justly known as 
the "Field of Lies." Centuries later the Swedes van- 
quished the imperial armies there under a Duke of 
Lorraine. To-day it is that thing known as "No 
Man's Land," brown with barbed-wire entanglements 
and rough with shell-holes — and other things besides. 

Back of it are the zigzagging German lines. It is, too, 
the place of the century-old legend of the Niedecker's 
young Thierry who, wandering there one night, saw 
strange sights. He had not drained a single glass of 
the Rang de Thann, nor of the red wine of Turckheim, 
called "Sang des Turcs" but was dreaming, as an adoles- 
cent does, of everything and nothing, when suddenly 
the very stones of the valley began to move, and great 
fissures showed in the earth. From them issued thou- 
sands upon thousands of warriors of bygone times, 
striking against their shields and crying out in strange, 
hoarse voices, "Hodeidah! Hodeidah!" 

Finally a man taller than all the others, Louis le 
Debonnaire, son of Charlemagne it was, his long, 
silvery hair surmounted by a gold and jeweled crown, 
jumped on a white horse and called by name, one 
after the other, the chiefs of his cohorts, who answered, 
"Here." 

Then the king, groaning with great groans, spoke be- 
seechingly the names of the sons he had begotten, 
Lothaire, Louis, and Pepin. 

But Lothaire, Louis, and Pepin mocked him and to 
further woimd him caused to be brought on the battle- 
field his nephew, Bernard, he who had taken arms 

103 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

against him and whose eyes the king had caused to be 
put out (and for this the king knew little sleep). 

Then as the battle begins the sightless Bernard jumps 
up behind the king's saddle, paralyzing his every move- 
ment. But at the very height of the combat, above its 
clash and shoutings, the third hour of morning sounds 
from a church tower, and suddenly the earth receives 
again the ancient host and all is as before. Only 
Thierry from the Niedeckers lay as if dead. 

And the Field of Lies, le Champ de Mensonges, is 
said to be the spot where the children of earth will be 
assembled at the Day of Judgment, for what crime can 
equal that of the sons of Louis, who conquered, impris- 
oned, and caused to die of grief a father whose only 
fault was that he loved them too well? It is even said 
that it is the troops of Louis who will sound the brazen 
trumps to awaken the dead for their last accounting. 

Now I see it as "No Man's Land," rusty and brown 
with patches of barbed wire, rough with great shell- 
holes, but they say that even in intervals of peace 
it is never so luxuriantly fertile as are the fields that lie 
about it. . . . 

A white, very white afternoon heaven stretches above 
us. Very violent cannonading. 

"Cest nous — c'est le Boche," Bernard repeats from 
time to time. Then his sharp eye distinguishes a group 
of German airplanes, and, looking where he points, I 
see five spots black, black in the white sky. 

They, too, are immediately fired on. I hear over my 
head the great swish made by the shells from the guns 
placed on a hill behind us — or so sounding. My ear is 
not quick to distinguish directions in these echoing hills. 

Little balls of snow-white shrapnel, like beautifully 
wound balls of fleecy wool, gently unloosen themselves 
about the black spots of the five airplanes, which, after 
a while, disappear to the east. 

104 



*' FIELD OF LIES" AND LAIMBACH 

Though not so overcome as the Niedecker's Thierry, 
I feel that my eyes, too, have looked on a strange 
spectacle. 

Then Laferriere rejoins us. By the pleased look on 
his face we guess that he hasn't made the wages of 
sin too high, and we continue on our way under the late, 
and still very white, afternoon sky. Suddenly the 
heavily plated, thickly enameled rust and gold and 
black of the hillsides seem to disappear and the earth 
is green again, young and tenderly green, like spring, 
but how and why? It lasted but a few minutes, for 
on the slopes toward Thann there was again the autumnal 
gleam of gold and rust, and spots of fathomless black. 

Entering Laimbach, we stopped to get the mayor, who 
was to conduct us to the old Jesuit church, half-way 
between his village and the village of Otzwiller, or 
rather its site, for Otzwiller disappeared completely 
during the Thirty Years' War, wherein each lovely 
Alsatian valley had been sacked and burned and de- 
stroyed, and friends of yesterday were enemies of to-day, 
and vice versa. 

The mayor was a voluble, amiable mayor, who had 
conserved, during those many German years, a vast 
amount of creaking, noisy, unpleasant French. 

His village was ancient, high-roofed, many-fountained, 
and had been much shelled. The streets were full of 
children playing, blue soldiers were walking about, 
girls were leaning out of the windows to give and get a 
greeting, or being pinched as they giggled about the 
streets, clicking their sabots in the mud. As we passed 
out the white sky darkened suddenly and a hard red 
began to bum in the west. We found ourselves near- 
ing a half-demolished fifteenth-century church, placed 
strangely between the battered, living village and the 
ghostly village of the Thirty Years' War. It was of 
gris rose and had been built on the foundations of an 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

even earlier one, and near it was a shell-shot, ancient, 
high, red-roofed presbytery. For generations the church 
had been a shrine of St. -Blaise, and on every 3d of 
February the mayor told us (but sadly, as one speaking 
of a pleasant past) there had been a great pilgrimage 
made by those suffering from throat maladies. 

Now over all was hanging a penetrating atmosphere 
of bootless desolation, and I was suddenly seized with 
an anxious feeling that I should be about the secret lonely 
business of my soul. Life seemed unbearably sad and 
short, and "where was the place of eternal happiness, 
the place where the Barbarian need be feared no 
more?" . . .* 

In front of the church had been placed, somewhat 
indiscreetly, the officers thought, a big battery. And 
the mayor said, too, apologetically, ''EviUment z'edait mat 
joizi par icard d I'eclise," for the battery had soon been 
sighted. After the church had received many shells 
right in her pink and lovely bosom, it had been moved 
some forty meters away, but even so it had again been 
reperee, and the church had suffered the usual fate of 
churches near batteries. Some fine old columns were 
left in the apse, of the delicious gris rose. For a moment 
Laferriere and I stood scaling off bits of the disfiguring 
gray plaster and wondering why it had ever been put 
on, it and all the other gray stucco that a certain austere 
century had plastered over gorgeous building-stone 
everywhere in Europe. 

The church, like the village of the Thirty Years' War, 
will soon be but a name, for its walls are cracked and 
sagging, and with another winter's frost they will crumble 
and fall. Through the roofless nave we walked over a 



^ And now let all those come who love Paxadise, the place of quiet, the 
place of safety, the place of eternal happiness, the place where the Bar- 
barian may be feared no more. — St. Augustine, Upon the Barbarian 
Persecution. 

106 



"FIELD OF LIES" AND LAIMBACH 

mass of tom-up old mosaic flooring, and heaps of gaudy 
modem stained glass fallen from the lovely, ancient, 
pointed windows. 

It was getting dark as we passed out into the dis- 
orderly cemetery, between the church and the battery 
(and even for a cemetery very uninviting, torn up as it 
was by recent shells). Ends of coffins were sticking out, 
shabby, twisted, bead wreaths and muddy, discolored 
tricolor badges lay about, while in the middle of a once 
tidy family plot, by name Hilz, was a huge new shell- 
hole of only the day before. 

The mayor gave a shudder as he looked at his own 
familiar graveyard, where his parents and his friends 
had been laid — though not to rest. He was out for the 
first time after grippe and he said, with a determined 
look and in his most creaking French, " If I have to die, 
all right, but I've forbidden my daughter to bury me 
here." Many, many had also fallen in the fields, and 
every^^here thin earth lay over damp, shallow graves 
marked by shabby, crooked crosses. Meadow mists 
were beginning to rise and the copper-colored edge had 
hardened in the sky. I felt again an inexpressible dis- 
couragement. I tried to think of Peace, so near, so 
hotly desired, so redly pursued, but I could only per- 
ceive the damp meadow, the demolished church, the 
gun-emplacements, the disorderly, shelled cemetery, 
and the humid odor of death and mold and rotting 
leaves. As yet nothing seemed to have risen incor- 
ruptible. 

We turned and went again along the dark, damp 
valley road till we reached the village with its consoling 
hum of life. Through the dusky street washed the 
lovely soft blue of soldiers; a group stood with some 
girls around the beautiful fountain, deeply pink in the 
half-light, built in the fifteenth century by the Jesuits, 
though the mayor insisted on placing the Sons of Loyola 
8 107 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

in the fourteenth. In fact, the Jesuits and the 
fourteenth century were one in his mind. Then, as far 
as he was concerned, came the war of 19 14. He wanted 
us to come into his house to partake of some brand of 
white liqueur — as I have said the people of these valleys 
distil all and every bright-colored fruit of their earth. 
It would seem that the whole flora of Alsace can be 
used to this end, and no matter which of God's colors 
go into their alembics, passing through, it comes out 
pure white, to befuddle the heads and harden the 
stomachs of the populace — and little boys are bom 
with the burden of deafness. Though twilight enveloped 
us, I knew the look that must be on the mayor's face, 
and something a bit phosphorescent came into his 
eyes as he spoke of a petite mirabelle. Fortunately, it 
was too late to accept. 

A few minutes later we found ourselves on the screened 
road to Masevaux, moving slowly, without lights, the 
road overlooking the Field of Lies, where the Germans 
watched. 

Above the hills in front of us was a very thin, very 
long, very red, crescent moon. No one spoke. 

Doubtless the officers, like myself, were wondering 
upon what, when it was full and white, its light would 
shine. Now it was turned to blood. 

The roads were crowded with rattling artillery wagons, 
transporting guns and supplies under cover of the deep, 
blue night. Once or twice on some hillside, turned away 
from the German valley, was the leaping of a flame, 
from the fire of a group of artilleurs, who were to wait 
the morning on wooded slopes. 

Thoughts of the ghostly village of Otzwiller, now 
but a name, pursued me, and of the Swedish invasion. 
And the miseries of the Thirty Years' War seemed to 
confound themselves with these of the war I know so 
well, while the night deepened, under the long, thin, 

108 



"FIELD OF LIES" AND LAIMBACH 

red moon, hanging behind black-palled hills, in a heaven 
that still had an edge of copper. 

A church bell sounded and something flying swiftly 
touched me at that hour of the evening sacrifice, and I 
knew then that those who tread the olives are rarely 
anointed with the oil, and I cried out within myself 
suddenly and in despair, a long-unremembered line of 
the great ItaHan : 

''Faro come colui che piange." 



X 

THE VALLEY OF THE THUR 

KTOV EMBER 7th, St.-Amarin. — This morning fare- 
•* ' well, perhaps a long farewell, to Masevaux, and I now 
dwell in the broad, sweet valley of the Thur. I had felt 
many pains of parting while putting my things into the 
Japanese straw basket and the little leather valise. This 
was quite a simple act, for I flatter myself that those 
receptacles contain only essentials, though I had long 
since begun to wish that I had brought another dress 
for evening, feeling a bit dull always buttoned up in my 
uniform, and only a white shirt changed from a blue 
one to mark the difference between morning and evening. 
One of those 191 8 dresses, that can be carried in the 
pocket without making it bulge, would not have added 
perceptibly to the weight of my accoutrement, and 
would have brightened up the popotes. The light from 
the Oberforster's chandelier at Masevaux was as pitiless 
as that which beats about thrones — and presidential 
chairs (which much resemble them) — and ladies en 
mission should come prepared. 

Before leaving I went to say good-by to Mere Labonne, 
who showed me the good things in preparation for 
luncheon and begged me to stay — scrambled eggs with 
truffles, two poulets ready for roasting, a tart au mocha 
that she was frosting on a marble table. But the look 
of one who goes was in my eyes, and she ceased to 
insist. 

Return to the Place du Chapitre; many offlcers and 

no 



THE VALLEY OF THE THUR 

motors under the yellowing trees in front of the Kom- 
mandantur, a general arriving, some sort of delegation 
departing. I say a thousand thanks to the amiable, 
cultivated, agreeable Demoiselles Braun, three of whom 
wear decorations for their war-work in hospitals, for 
contagious diseases, and one, St(?phanie, "qui n'a pas dit 
son dernier mot,'' is charming after the way of the per- 
ceptive, witty women of the seventeenth or eighteenth 
century. Then I find m^^self getting into the motor 
of the commandant, who, in the meantime, has greeted 
and sped the general on his way. His face has some- 
thing shining about it as he gives the great news, written 
on the no longer insubstantial air, of the German demand 
for an armistice. Then he reads the communique from 
the Belfort newspaper as we drive out of Masevaux, tell- 
ing us more about the Germans in full retreat, and the 
Americans close behind them at Sedan! What a rustling 
of the pages of history ! The mind leaps to new things, 
life normal again, and all forces bent to reconstruction. 

As we pass over the screened road to Thann, where 
we are to lunch with the military mayor. Captain Saint- 
Girons, the net of broom and pine camouflage, screening 
the valley where the Germans are, suddenly seemed 
some monument of ancient history; and, unlike the 
noisy hours of yesterday, there was no sound of cannon. 

Arrived at Thann, it is we who give the great, the 
unbelievable, the unrealizable news of the demand for 
an armistice to Captain Saint-Girons, who, with several 
uniformed schoolmasters, is waiting in front of the 
Mairie to receive us. And our "feet are beautiful as 
the feet of them that bring the Gospel of Peace and 
glad tidings of good things." 

I think for a moment how strange for me to carry 
it to them, to these men, who have fought for it, who 
have waited for it, watched for it, bled for it — but every- 
thing is strange in this strangest of all strange worlds. 

Ill 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

Going into the house, we find other schoolmasters, 
with some bright -eyed little boys ranging in years from 
seven to twelve. 

Then to lunch. I sit on the commandant's right, 
Captain Gasquet, adjoint of the mayor, on my other 
side, the mayor himself opposite, the schoolmasters 
placed prudently and watchfully near that selected flock, 
who enliven the ends of the table. Now these little 
Alsatian hopefuls are very bright of eye, rosy of cheek, 
and on their good behavior, which, in spite of lurking 
potentialities, persisted during the lunch, even when 
a glow, doubtless not unaccustomed, tinged their 
cheeks, as they drank the wine of their own hillsides. 

At dessert I asked Commandant Poulet to drink to 
Sedan, the new Sedan. I thought within myself, "Is 
it not even now as a temple being cleansed and glorified 
in the chalice of the blood of my people, the blood of the 
khaki-clad youths from over the seas, whom Fate, 
since all time, had decreed to unseal it?" Tears came 
to my eyes, there was a deep beat in my breast. 

And it had been forty-eight years and two months 
and seven days since it was torn from a vanquished 
France. 

I scarcely remember what was said of the day's 
events; feeling, rather than thought, was flooding about 
the table, and it was in gratitude, in wonderment, and 
rather silently, for a group of Frenchmen, that the 
luncheon proceeded. Each was thinking perhaps of 
his part of loss and grief making up the victory. 

Names of Americans who had visited Thann were 
spoken: Dr. Herbert Adams Gibbons, long the friend 
of Alsace, and in some wise, as I told them, the god of 
the machine directing my steps to them; Mr. John 
Weare ; and others whom I don't recall. There had been, 
too, a fair and fleeting vision of Mrs. Bliss one snowy 
winter day. 

112 



THE VALLEY OF THE THUR 

Many beautiful words were said of my country, 
and in that hour I think it was, to them of the recon- 
quered triangle, "dulcc et decora" to have even the 
least of the daughters of the Stars and Stripes at their 
board, that hers should have been among the feet bring- 
ing "the glad tidings of good things." 

When coffee and qiictsch and cigarettes were passed 
around, the schoolmasters made ready to pour some 
of the heady white liqueur into the glasses of even the 
smallest of the little boys, but the commandant said, 
"No," and cigarettes only are offered to the babes. I 
would put my hand in the fire (knowing I could draw 
it out unsinged) that it was not the first time they had 
puffed "caporals." The seven-year-old one held his 
with an astounding ease, not entirely hereditary. When 
he had finished he was stood on a chair, from which he 
recited "L^ Loiip et VAgneau," the lines concerning 
the now extremely well-demonstrated "La raison du 
plus fort est toujour s la meilleure," being given almost at 
a breath, one word tightly tied to another in quite an 
ingenious w^ay. 

An older one, whose naturally flashing eye was slightly 
restrained only by the solemnity of the occasion, gave 
us the equally classic, "Maidre corpeau sur un arbre 
berg^." He hadn't been caught so young, and the old 
Adam in the shape of his German accent was heavy 
upon him. Then, standing in a row, they sang "Le 
Chant du Depart," that greatest of all the wars' 
marching songs, and the childish voices cut my 
heart lilsie a knife, and tears were loosened, and 
through their blur I seemed to see the march of the 
generations of Alsace adown the ages, fulfilling the 
shifting, cruel destinies of border peoples. Ghosts of 
the Thirty Years' War, of the Napoleonic wars, of 1870, 
and of 1 9 14, and of the other dateless struggles that 
have ravaged their rich valleys, come before me. I 

113 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

weep and weep, and my handkerchief is a microscopic, 
damp, gray ball. I have an idea that pride of sex alone 
restrained the blue-clad men from tears. Peace, lovely 
Peace, desired like the morning, was arising, but her 
light was to shine on rivers of blood, running through 
such black ruins that her glory and her sweetness, and 
even her hope, hurt with a great hurt, and I thought 
again on those who, empty-armed, must yet rejoice. . . . 

Afterward I strolled along the banks of the pebbly 
Thur with the commandant and Captain Saint-Girons. 
There is a river-path leading under balconied, red- 
roofed houses, or by gray walls, and there is an old 
round tower having a caplike roof with a point on the 
top, and against it are silhouetted a poplar and a syca- 
more. Nearly everywhere the lovely gray lace spire 
of the cathedral shows above roof or tree or chimney; 
and it is said that though Strasbourg's cathedral is 
higher and Friburg's is wider, Thann's is the loveliest.^ 

When the Mission had its headquarters at Thann, 
the commandant and Captain Saint-Girons were wont 
to walk along this path in the afternoon, holding a 
sort of tribunal, receiving petitions, granting favors, 
righting differences that may occur even among the 
delivered, quite after the fashion of Saint-Louis receiving 
the petitions of his people tmder the great tree. 

The river flows through the heart of the lovely old 
town, badly bombarded in spots. To our left as we 
walked rose the deep-colored hills in the full afternoon 
burnishing of their deep rusty reds and pale gilts. As 
we pass up the steep winding road we meet the Due 
de Tr6vise, under-lieutenant, with a sketch in his hand 
of a shell-shot historic corner of Thann, the commandant 
wishing to save at least a memorial wherever he can. 
Furthermore, Thann was black-spotted with our negro 

^ " S'Strassburger Munster isch s'hoschet, s'Friburgers' dickscht, 
aver S'Thanner s'fienecht." 

114 




THANN. LA VIEILLE TOUR 



THE VALLEY OF THE THUR 

troops. Sometimes I stopped and spoke, sometimes 
I waved as I passed, just to see the full, white-toothed 
smile against the exotic background. 

The orphanage toward which we are bound is in the 
old Chateau de Marsilly, beautifully situated in the 
cleft of its own hill and restored not too cruelly. Close 
above it rises the Engelberg, the tower of whose castle 
was blown up when Turcnnc practised the arts of war 
in the valley. Part of it lies like a great ring, and is 
called the "Eye of the Witch." To our right as we 
mount is a V-shaped glimpse of the valley where the 
Germans lie intrenched, formed by close, rich hillsides, 
on which lie in lovely, ruglike designs the vineyards of 
rhett reuse Alsace f^conde en vignohlcs. 

A charming, vivacious nun whose age was unguessable 
by twenty j'ears, dark-eyed and satin-skinned, whose 
manners could not have been surpassed for ease by 
any woman of the great world, greets us. I think for 
the thousandth time how perfect the polish the con- 
ventual life gives. I have seen in peasant cottages 
the rooms wherein they were born, these women of 
restrained gesture, of dignified mien, of easy charm in 
conversation, of finished courtesy, and realize again 
that something invisible, imponderable, yet all-powerful, 
shapes the coarse block, polishes the rough surface, till 
there is no resemblance to that out of which it was hewn. 

As we turn to go down we stand for a moment looking 
again through the V-shaped cleft at the rich, blue 
plain held by the enemy. 

"How often," said Captain Saint-Girons, after a 
silence, "it has seemed to me like the Promised Land, 
and how often during these four interminable years 
have I longed to look at these hills /rem the plain." 

"Now all is fulfilling itself," I answered. 

The commandant said nothing, but his gaze, too, was 
fixed on the wide horizon. 

"5 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

Then we visited the military cemetery, a pleasant 
place, as cemeteries go, with many trees, and fallen, 
rustling leaves, and a few late-blooming flowers. Many 
sons of France were lying there since "the beginning"; 
others had been but lately laid away. The two officers 
stood for a moment with uncovered heads by the graves 
of four comrades of the Mission, killed by a bomb in 
front of the Mairie, as they were going in for lunch. 
Again I bowed my head and tears were loosened. Never 
as in this war has "death been made so proud with pure 
and princely beauty." How can we so soon be engaged 
in "business as usual," compete with the splendor of 
these dead? 

Then we pass down the valley of the Thur, so greatly 
loved by those who dwell therein, inclosed by purple 
and dark-amber hills, but inclosed easily, widely, 
leaving room for fancy, for delight, with no sense of 
being shut in by heaps of earth that press too tight. 

As we enter St.-Amarin, the long, central street is 
like a pale-blue ribbon, for through it a battalion of 
some Marseilles regiment is passing. As my eye 
received it I knew the lovely picture for some bleaching 
daguerreotype, its color and lineaments to fade in the 
bright light of peace. We stop a moment at the Ad- 
ministration building and see again M. de Maroussem, 
to whom, on meeting him first at Madame Galland's, 
I had said, "You are an Englishman?" And to those 
who have frequented international worlds I don't need 
to say how he looks. To others I would say that he is 
tall, blond, athletic, wearing easily a well-cut, not too 
new uniform, and having a perceptive blue eye (which, 
however, is really a very French eye when one takes 
a second look). One would have known that he hunted 
in England and had polo-ponies in France. In civil 
life he is a banker. 

Now among other things he is chef of the St.-Amarin 

ii6 



THE VALLEY OF THE THUR 

popotc and tells me dinner is at 7.45 "tapant." The 
hour is near wherein I am to be shown how far superior 
the St.-Amarin popote is to that of Masevaux. 

Then the commandant accompanies me to the house 
of M. Helmer, the well-known Alsatian lawyer who is 
counsel for the Mission. Also it was he who defended 
Hansi w^hen he was brought before the German courts 
and condemned for Use-majest^.^ 

From the great bowed window of Madame Flelmer's 
drawing-room I could look down the suddenly mystical- 
seeming valley, discerned by the spirit rather than the 
eye at 4.30 of a November afternoon. It was but a 
stretch of white filmy substance between violet hills, 
under a gray-green heaven, with something warm and 
precious at its western edge. Such a passing of the day 
as the saints of old would have loved. 

Hung along the wall opposite the great window are 
engravings of the Mantegna frieze from Hampton 
Court, and there were many books. 

After tea the commandant took his leave and Madame 
Helmer showed me to my comfortable room where I 
had thirty saving minutes, horizontal and in the dark, 
fully conscious, but completely resting, thought con- 
secutive but not active, flowing in a smooth way between 
banks of quiet nerves in quiet flesh. 

"Seven forty-five tapant" finds me again at the 



1 Some of the jokes that were Hansi's xindoing were exceedingly harm- 
less, as, for instance, the domestic revelations of Frau Professor Kugelberg, 
who answers to the correspondence column the following: "No, I 
never throw away the old trousers of my husband. I have had great 
success with cutting them skilfully and employing the least worn parts, 
in constructing for my young daughters charming and dainty corset- 
covers, which have the merit also of being very inexpensive. Trimmed 
with white ribbons, these corset-covers have quite a virginal air, but also 
with apple-green and cherry-red bows they can be made most attractive." 
As for "Professor Knatschke " he is now a classic. The Alsatians have, in 
a very marked degree, what one might call the wit of border peoples, 
the tongue often being the only weapon left them. 

117 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

Administration building, whither M. Helraer accom- 
panied me, and it is very pleasant as I enter. Com- 
mandant Poulet is sitting at a huge desk signing papers, 
more blue-clad officers and two infirmUres are presented, 
after which we pass into the dining-room, whose doors 
are flung open in classic style by a well-trained orderly. 
In Masevaux we simply gathered and sat down. Now 
the mess-table of St.-Amarin has a decided touch of 
elegance, too, in the way of pink-shaded candles, and 
in the middle there was an arrangement of chrysanthe- 
mums and autumn leaves. Instead of a Mere Labonne 
they have a cordon hleu who performs his rites very 
suitably in the dark-blue uniform of the chasseurs. We 
sit down to a dinner that might have been served with 
pride at Voisin's or the Cafe de Paris, where all except 
the chairs is extra and getting back a cane or hat costs 
the remaining eye (if one remains) of the head. I am 
indeed impressed, as I was meant to be, and M. de 
Maroussem might have said, "Didn't I tell you so?" 
in his pure and pleasant English. I sat between the 
commandant and Captain Perdrizet, chief of the Forestry- 
Service of the Thann district, and to the sound of can- 
non, which in spite of peace prospects was heavily 
firing over the Hartmannswillerkopf, we consumed 
carpes a la Flamande, a course of game elaborately 
presented with all its feathers, finishing with poire s 
Bordaloue, the whole perpetuated on a charming menu 
card decorated with the classic Alsatian stork by 
Andrieux, one of the officers of the mess. 

As I sat down I saw in front of me a sign over the 
door leading into the pantry, a somewhat Y. M. C. A.-ish 
sign, ''Sois sobre et tu vivras longtemps" ("Be sober and 
you will live long"), and de Maroussem's feelings were 
almost hurt when I asked if perhaps behind me there 
was one that said, "Mange peu et tu seras invito souvent" 
("Eat little and you will be invited often"). And when 

ii8 



THE VALLEY OF THE THUR 

it came time for coffee and cigarettes and some especially 
old quetsch he brought out the book, "The Friends of 
France," that I had first seen at Harry Sleeper's in 
Gloucester Bay, a thousand years ago, it seemed, and we 
turned to the death and citation of Norman Hall, Com- 
mandant Poulet recalling again that he had begun his 
work in Alsace on the 25th of December, 1914, and on 
the 26th he had stood by Norman Hall's open grave. 

Then a radio, just received, concerning the Parle- 
mentaries, is discussed; among them is slated von 
Hintze, leading to talk of the days when I had known 
him in Mexico. Count Oberndorf, too, husband of a 
dear and charming friend of Dutch and American birth, 
was on the list, and we spoke of Vienna as it had been 
— and was no more. Sic transit . . . though I thought 
vdthin myself, as I looked, for a flashing moment, down 
the vista of history, m^any things return. 

It was late when two officers accompanied me to 
my dwelling, to the sucking sound of boots in mud, 
and under a starless sky hanging dark and heavy over a 
black, black earth. At last I could draw literally the 
drapery of my couch about me and lie down to dreams 
of my men in blood and glory before Sedan. 



XI 

THE RE-GALLICIZING OF ALSACE 

ATOVEMBER 8th, St.-Amarin, Night—Fancy and feel- 
•* » ing too quickened for sleep. If there is anything I 
did not see or anything I did not feel, in and about 
St.-Amarin> I challenge some one of the Mission to 
produce it. 

This was my day, or rather half of it. At 8.45 Lieu- 
tenant Press, Inspector of Schools, came to fetch me, 
and not knowing how to be late (alack!), I am on the 
stairs as he rings the bell. We pass out into a white, 
rather flat November world toward the schooUiouses, 
everywhere the clean odor of freshly hewn wood and 
sawdust hangnig on the November air. 

Now the re-Gallicizing of Alsace is one of the most 
interesting political operations I have ever seen, and 
Heaven knows I've seen many in many lands. But this 
washing out and marking in of history on the clean 
slate of childhood is different from anything else, though 
easier than most things, the eye of youth glancing 
easily from earth to heaven and from heaven to earth — 
and soft and eager the slate of its mind. 

The St.-Amarin schoolhouse is a large, solid building, 
its walls hung everywhere with huge war-posters, all 
of those one sees in Paris and many besides. 

The classes for the smaller children, in accordance 
with the traditions of the valley, here also are in the 
hands of the Sisters of "The Divine Providence," who, 
in the earliest years of the nineteenth century, opened in 

120 



RE-GALLICIZING OF ALSACE 

St.-Amarin the first school for girls. The other classes 
are taught by carefully selected Alsatian teachers or 
by mobilized French schoolmasters. Formerly French 
was the language of honor, for the well-to-do only, but 
now this article, once "of luxury," is for all the lan- 
guage of their country and their heart, and pride mixes 
with the zeal with which the peasants pursiie la belle 
langiic — not always successfully. For in these border 
regions the tongue has an un-Gallic thickness; the 
voice is placed far back in the throat, with a strong 
accent on the tonic, nothing of the light flinging from the 
lips that makes the beauty of the French language and 
its conquest so difficult. 

We begin with a class of small children, where a 
smiling, almost exuberantly happy nun is teaching a 
group of little delivered darlings to sing, ''II y avail une 
bergire et ron, ron, ron, petit pat d pon" — to my surprise, 
in the latest manner of Jacques Dalcroze. They evi- 
dently mean to keep abreast of the times here in Alsace. 

While they recited I looked about. The room was 
large, light, and superheated by a small, black, iron 
stove fiercely burning. On the wall were maps of the 
Old World, and, I had almost said, of the world to 
come, for new divisions of countries were indicated. 
Among the many posters and in the place of honor 
w^as a big colored text, which I afterward saw in every 
room, with the head-line, "Pourquoi on ne pent pas con- 
clure une paix fondle sur la parole de V Allemagne " ("Why 
one cannot make a peace founded on the word of 
Germany"). 

The children were literally as good as gold. No 
scuffling of feet nor restless rubbing about on the seats. 
I remarked this as we left the room after listening to 
"Le Loup et VAgneau" recited in those shrill, thin 
voices, and Lieutenant Fress said, with a smile: 

"What remains of the Boche discipline makes them 

121 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

docile and attentive scholars; they are often several 
hours in class without needing to be reprimanded for 
chattering or lack of attention." 

Later I delicately inquired about ink-throwing or 
"spitballs," but it appeared they're unknown. 

We then betook ourselves upstairs to a class of older 
girls, from ten to thirteen or thereabouts, to whom 
Lieutenant Press, with the greatest confidence, put the 
most difficult questions. It was a class of French 
history, and he began boldly with the Druids and 
finished with the war of 1 9 1 4. He has a gift for teaching, 
and was so easy with those children, whom I should 
have been embarrassed, not to say terrified, to approach, 
that the answers came pleasantly and quickly. When 
at a certain moment, however, there was a delay, I got 
anxious, thinking to myself, suppose the Sister or Lieu- 
tenant Fress were to say to the class : 

"You don't know? Then we must ask this aimable 
lady who has come across the ocean to visit you. She 
will tell us." And of Charles the Fat, then engaging 
our attention, I only remembered vaguely that he had 
had a saintly wife of whom he grew tired. There were 
other questions, too, about Louis of Aquitaine, which 
awakened only the faintest echoes in memory, but which 
to my relief were answered to complete satisfaction 
by a determined, dark-eyed, round-faced girl of twelve 
or thereabouts. 

Lieutenant Fress then asked who could recite '^La 
Laitiire et le Pot au Lait." All hands shot up, and the 
recitation proceeded with much brio. 

' ' What does this teach us ? " he boldly asked at the end. 

At this a heavy-jawed, but very bright, near-together- 
eyed girl raised her hand without a second's hesitation, 
and equally without a second's hesitation answered: 

"To think only of the present." As is elegantly ex- 
pressed in the enemies' tongue, that girl wasn't one of 



RE-GALLICIZING OF ALSACE 

whom it would be said she would be "left hanging," 
except of course as regards the imponderabilities. 

Lieutenant Press: "But is it well to think only of the 
present? What of imagination, and things that may 
happen in the future?" 

A small, undersized girl with a deep-blue eye some- 
what nervously answered : 

"In imagination one builds castles in Spain." 

This was encouraging, but what she called chdteaux 
d'Espagne seemed not, however, to find great favor, for a 
silence fell on that bright-eyed class. 

"But isn't that all right?" continued Lieutenant 
Press, giving a filHp. "Must we think only of the things 
we can see and touch?" 

At the mention of seeing and touching, hands again 
shot up. He indicated a thick-haired, heavy-browed 
girl. 

"In thinking of the things she doesn't see, the good 
housewife would forget to cook the dinner, et cela serait 
tommage," was the answer coming from the deepest 
depths of her consciousness. 

On which we leave the schoolroom, with its extremely 
practical atmosphere, the argument being unanswerable, 
even by Lieutenant Press. I could but think on that 
long line of peasants who have wrestled with realities, 
begotten, brought forth, tilled the soil, baked the bread, 
struggling all the time with their border-destiny, nature 
and history, even more than their own wills, having 
made them what they are. It struck me as reasonable 
that they should be a canny set, those little girls. Some- 
thing alert, perceptive of realities, was forming them, 
they could not be over-given to dreams, for which one 
is both sorry and glad, according to the way one happens 
to feel about human things at the moment — and not 
necessarily the way they are. Even Marcus Aurelius 
tells us that "if a thing displease us" (I suppose he 
9 123 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

only forgot to add, "or if a thing please us") "it is not 
that thing, but our view of that thing." And cer- 
tainly a lot of perfectly good things are spoiled by the 
point of view. 

In the next room they were having a lesson in Ameri- 
can history, quite in the note everywhere these days, 
and I know the Sister saw the hand of God as I entered 
at that special moment (she was a quiet-eyed, not very- 
young Sister, who had trod further paths than those of 
learning). Then and there I heard the tale of the 
Boston Tea-party, and its consequences, of the War of 
the Rebellion, and the name of Lincoln, pronounced 
"Lancone," who "wanted all men to be free and equal," 
sounded through the room. No one, of course, expressed 
a doubt, nor ever will in schoolrooms, that men aren't 
free, neither are they equal. As for myself, I thank 
God nearly every morning that some men always will 
be better than others, realizing that there is more 
difference between man and man than between man 
and beast, which truth was recalled to me but shortly 
by an equalitarian friend of the New Republic — but 
it's not for schools, like many other truths. Even 
Saint Paul can do nothing except cry out, "Shall not 
the potter have power to shape the vessel as he will, 
some to honor, some to dishonor?" which again recog- 
nizes the fact of inequality without explaining it. How- 
ever, there's no use going into that now. 

I soon found myself in a class of boys of twelve to 
fifteen years of age. They were having a lesson in 
German, and were reading a "piece" called ''Der arme 
Sepp," the history of whose misfortunes (he was a stable- 
boy, and the horse ran away and the wagon was broken, 
and he was received by his master with blows) didn't 
seem to stick; for after it had been read out no boy, 
in answer to Lieutenant Press's questions, could recount 
the short and simple annals of poor Sepp. 

124 



RE-GALLICIZING OF ALSACE 

They weren't nearly so bright as the girls. Dull-eyed, 
pimply-faced, squeaky-voiced, they were wrestling with 
something that was for the time stronger than books — 
the eternal Friihlings ErwacJicn, that has always occupied 
philosophers and scientists — though not so much parents, 
who are apt to avoid the issues involved. 

We passed finally into a class where young women 
were dissecting Les Obsiques de la Lionne, under the 
guidance of a brown-bearded, one-armed teacher in 
uniform. It was a small room, and you could have 
cut the air with a knife. And for the mist I could 
scarcely see the placard ''Ponrquoi on ne pent pas conclure 
une paix Jondee stir la parole d' Allemagne" and the por- 
traits of Clemenceau and Poincare. 

About this time I began to understand that La 
Fontaine is the pillar of the French educational system ; 
and there is no doubt that he did clear up a lot of doubt- 
ful things, in the most liquid use of the clearest of all 
languages. 

We listened here to dissertations on the falseness of 
courts and courtiers, the charms of which were not 
touched on. How those who frequented them learned 
disastrous habits of dissimulation, not to say lying, and 
how 'twas better to live in obscurity (which for some 
reason is always supposed to be cheerful and where 
nobody ever lies perhaps because it isn't worth v/hile). 
Courts are not in favor anywhere just now, but every- 
body mil admit they've had a glorious past; and as for 
democracy's future, which the Bolsheviki and the New 
Freedom are decidedly handicapping, they may run it a 
close second. This class was not so interesting, however, 
as were the children's — discussions of intellectual prop- 
ositions by people who aren't intellectual being an 
awful bore at any time. 

Toward the end there was a horrid moment. Lieu- 
tenant Fress bearing up with equanimity, when the 

I2S 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

over-bold teacher, interrupting the reading, asked the 
meaning of the word "apotMose.'' Dead silence. 

"Coniinuez," he finally said, though a young woman 
with an immense amount of corn-colored hair waved 
low about some spectacled blue eyes, and wearing a large 
silver pin with the word "Adieu" on it, showed signs of 
being about to bring forth the answer. 

They finished the fable in unison in their strong 
border-accent, which seemed to get thicker and thicker 
as we got farther up the flights of learning. 

Amusez les rots par tes songes, 
FlaUez-les, payez les d'agrSables mensonges. 
Quelque iniignation dont leur coeur soil rembli, 
lis goberont I'abbdt, vous serez leur ami. 

But methought it isn't anything like what the "peo- 
ple" will have to "swallow," when everybody is free 
and nobody is equal. And I wondered again at those 
who think to change the destinies of nations from with- 
out, by formulas or commands, when each evolves 
mysteriously, mystically, inevitably from within, out 
of its own particular shape and substance and strength. 
Even one from over the seas, clad in the supremest 
power a great nation has ever lent a mortal, though he 
pull the earth to pieces in the attempt, cannot change 
this law of nature. "Que direz-vous, races futures? " 

And time respects nothing that is done without it. 

As we came out into the square, little boys were 
bringing in armfuls of wood for their schoolroom stoves, 
others were already noisily scampering home for dinner 
in the crisp, sawdusty air; straight columns of smoke 
from many chimneys evoked women standing about 
noonday fires; there was a homely, human feeling about 
it all. . . . 

As I went through the school it seemed to me that the 
types of the children were modified in two ways, inclin- 

126 



RE-GALLICIZING OF ALSACE 

ing now toward the elongated head, with pointed chin, 
dark hair, dark eyes, and mantHng color, now toward 
the round-headed, square-jawed, blond type, with full, 
dreamy, blue eyes. But under these modifications one 
felt that there was a persistent something that was their 
own, neither German nor French nor anything else, 
for all the mingling; the Alsatian root and stem, with 
an inalienable, peculiar life mounting in it, its very own, 
its race-gift. 

And this essential gift, this rich, diverse inheritance, 
had been received from each point of the compass. 
From the south, through the defiles of the Alps, the 
great Latin traditions had infiltered. From the north 
and east had come Germanic thought, with its mystical 
reactions, its metaphysical inclinations, its marvelous 
legends, and its romantic chronicles of gods and half- 
gods. From the west, from Gaul, came grace and 
courtesy and the deathless wish for liberty. Was ever 
a people more richly endowed? Yet, how shall even 
such a seed grow if it never lie quiet in the warm dark- 
ness of the earth ? . . . 

Then I turned from the paths of learning, and went 
over to the very well-kept ambulance, in charge, since 
several years, of the ladies from Mulhouse, whom I 
had met at dinner the night before. 

And I stood by the bed of a d3dng negro of the Fif- 
teenth New York Infantry, his eyes already glazed, and 
thought how he was to leave the broad valley of the 
Thur for that other wider Valley of the Soul, where, 
it is said, we are all of one color. And I am inclined to 
believe it, for the further I go, even in this life, the less 
real difference I find in people; even the white, unfortu- 
nately, are extraordinarily alike about most things; and 
one can but wonder why the few high differences, rather 
than the low and easy likenesses, are discouraged by 
so many good men. 

127 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

Then I sought out the church of pink stone, passing 
a pink fountain in the chestnut-planted square it fronts 
on, where blue-clad soldiers were coming and going, 
busy about their midday meal. And, entering the 
church, I thought, after commending the soul of the 
negro to its Maker, of St.-Amarin, who has given his 
name to the broad, sweet valley and its pleasant town. 

The chronicles have it that he erected an oratory 
hereabouts with his own hands. Later when St.-Prix, 
the holy bishop of Auvergne, was passing by, on his way 
to the court of Childeric to obtain permission to build a 
church, he stopped at the oratory to rest and found its 
builder lying ill of a fever. St.-Prix making the sign 
of the cross upon his breast, immediately the fever falls, 
and Amarin finds himself bathed in a gentle sweat. He 
arises, gives thanks to God, and in gratitude offers to 
accompany St.-Prix to the king's court. 

Now, some time before, St.-Prix had run afoul of a 
vicious, thick-souled man named Hector, Count of 
Marseille. The matter being brought to court, in the 
final judgment the holy bishop had been acquitted, and 
the wicked Hector convicted and put to death. 

But the family of Hector was proud and vengeful 
and powerful (in our days we've seen such), and learning 
that St.-Prix had set out on the journey, sent a squad 
of archers and other soldiery to make away with him 
en route. 

These came upon him, accompanied by St.-Amarin, 
in a village known as Volvic. Now when Amarin saw 
the assassins stretching their bows, the first thought of 
the natural man was to get out of harm's way. But St.- 
Prix, further advanced in sanctity and therefore more 
perceptive of the invisibilities, seizing him by the arm, 
said to him the words, alas! so incomprehensible to us, 
children of the age: "If you lose this opportunity for 
martyrdom, you will perhaps never find it again ! " 

128 



RE-GALLICIZING OF ALSACE 

At this Amarin stood his ground, though one has a 
feeHng from the little one knows of him that he had a 
natural love for life. He was the first to be massacred, 
"his soul leaving his body in the company of angels." 

The assassins, thinking their work well done, were 
about to depart, when St. -Prix called to them, saying : 
"But I am he whom you seek. Do with me what you 
will." Whereupon one of the evil men, Radebert by 
name, gave him a sword-thrust through the breast. 
And as he cried out the words each one of us should 
ever have ready on his tongue (Heaven knows they are 
needed often enough), "Forgive them, Lord, they know 
not what they do," another thrust caused his brains to 
spurt from his head. Whereupon angels were seen 
again descending, and the murderers, appalled by a 
great light that filled the valley, took their flight. 

Sitting quietly in the pink church of St. -Amarin 
(its interior is noble of breadth and length, though not 
high), I thought how sweet is the mystical gift, and that 
one but stingily endowed in other ways, without houses 
or lands, or even learning or beauty or grace, if he have 
but the inner light, draws many unto him. 

So alluring are such that kings in anguish call for them; 
even the wasters of life, they know not why, sometimes 
seek them out; others have been known to forget their 
money-making, or stop their spending, and render them- 
selves physically uncomfortable, trying to get at the 
strange and secret gift they offer. 

For the permanent interest of life is the unseen, and 
neither visible joys nor visible griefs can compete with 
it, nor any of the ways of the flesh, however pleasant 
or however straight. 

And who would not sometimes dwell on these inner 
stages of the life-journey? With joy on the first period, 
which is that of innocence, passing with a sigh to the 
second, which is that of deviation ; with a moistening of 

129 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

the dry heart to the third, that of reconciliation. Finally 
in humility to the fourth and last, which is that of pil- 
grimage, where the soul, accepting the two great natural 
abhorrences, old age and dissolution, hopeth for redemp- 
tion and renewal. . . . 

And then I found the clock was striking twelve and I 
left the inner world (alas! rarely is my stay in it long, 
even if no clock strikes) and hurried to the popote. 



XII 

THE HARTMANNSWILLERKOPF 
^'Now thou art come upon a feast of death" 

VERY pleasant luncheon, after the accounting of the 
flesh, though not dallied over, as Captain Perdrizet, 
a man (Heaven reward him; I never can) of much dan 
and quite a little perception of values, suggested chang- 
ing my afternoon program, which was that of calling 
on various members of the high and comfortable bour- 
geoisie, whose "fleeting mansions" are Icnown to me in 
many lands. When I found that, instead of basking 
in the comforts of this same bourgeoisie, eating their 
sweet and pleasant cakes, sitting in their deep arm- 
chairs, looking at the portraits of their ancestors, fin- 
gering their bric-^-brac and looking out at their view, 
I might, if the special commander of the special sector 
so willed it, make a pilgrimage to the sacramental 
Hartmannswillerkopf, where fifty thousand sleep — and 
w^here others even then as we spoke were laying them- 
selves down, my heart was greatly quickened and my 
soul, after its manner, began to bum. 

The sun was coming out between heavy showers as 
Captain Perdrizet and I departed hastily for Wesserling, 
where the permission w^as to be got. Now Wesserling 
rather deserves a page of its own, for many reasons, 
though, having a single thought — that of the pilgrimage 
— I gave but a glance at the very interesting little war- 
museum, stamped hastily on memory the quite delicious 

131 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

emplacement of the old chateau, now divided into various 
large and comfortable dwellings of the people on whom 
I was to call, and commanding the lovely valley to the 
west. Captain Perdrizet, who proved at every step to 
be a man of sequence as well as enthusiasm, took me 
straight to Commandant de Saint-Denis. After some 
conversation, which I politely didn't catch, but which 
terminated by: "Oui, si c'est comme go" (I looked perhaps 
more reasonable than I felt with that heat about my 
heart), "but I must telephone to the commandant of 
the sector at Camp Wagram, and from there you must 
proceed with an armed escort." Gratefully, but with 
exceeding celerity, we shook the dust of the Kommandan- 
tur from our feet, and returned through the valley as 
far as Wilier, when we began to rise in a world of mist 
and breaking light, from time to time deluged by a 
diamond-like shower. Up, up through hills that one 
can no longer call changeless, for they are hills with their 
heads nicked off, neither branch nor leaf left on the 
stumps that outline their notched and shabby crests. 
Past batteries and gun-emplacements, embedded in 
wet foliage, many of them made by American troops 
last summer. Deep through a world of rusty beeches, 
with pine forests splashed like ink on near hills, here 
and there the torch of a larch — m^Uze, it is called — and 
it is the only one of its family that grows yellow in 
autumn and sheds its foliage, and doubtless kind heaven 
made it so, that it might be a lamp in dark forests. 
There was the sound of rushing waters ; and everywhere 
that beauty of moving, blue, helmeted figures afoot, on 
horseback, or on muleback was woven into highway 
and forest path, and to mind came immortal verses, of 
which I changed two words : 

Know'st thou the mountain-bridge that hangs on cloud? 
Blue men in mist grope o'er the torrent loud. 
In caves lie coiled the dragon's ancient brood. 

133 




AMERICAN TROOPS AT MASEVAUX CELEBRATING THE FOURTH OF JULY 




[See page 2(> 
FRENCH TROOPS AT MASEVAUX CELEBRATING THE FALL OF THE 
BASTILE, JULY I4TH 



THE HARTMANNSWILLERKOPF 

For do not everywhere "in caves" great guns "lie 
coiled" whose "ancient brood" are these munition- 
heaps spawned upon the mountain-side? 

Up, still up, past a long convoy of munitions and 
food mounting slowly and heavily to the sacrificial 
Hartmannswillerkopf, which seems like a great altar 
under whose stone lie many saints — and the number of 
its cemeteries is one hundred and thirteen, while God 
alone knows the unnamed, unnumbered graves, and 
those yet to be dug. I find that rarely do the bones 
of soldiers travel far, and so it should be, for what 
spot, even of a father's inheritance, is so truly his as that 
\\'here he has fallen? No litigation of man can despoil 
him of it, and even when he and his deeds are forgotten 
it is still his. So let him lie. 

Ever^'wdiere from the forest came strong, damp odors 
of things fugitive and deciduous. The violently released 
sap of shell-splintered and broken trees mingled its 
odors with that other natural smell of falling leaf. 
Lush mosses exuding still deeper, earthier odors were 
folded about the broken shafts in soft, green velvet 
swatliings. And some of these forest wounds were 
new, some old and almost healed, like the human 
griefs of the war. 

At a sharp turn in the road we leave the motor, 
passing on foot many camouflaged dugouts, and, some- 
what breathless, reach the collection of low wooden 
huts known as "Camp Wagram." Each little building 
has layers of fresh pine branches on its roof, and its 
sides are painted in piebald or zebra-like patterns. 

We were shown into the dugout of the commandant, 
commanding the 363 d Infantry, whom we found writ- 
ing at a little pine table. He received us smiling, and 
not surprised, our visit having been announced by 
telephone. A smallish man with very attentive eyes, 
w^hose quiet exterior and strong Burgundy accent cover, 

133 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

I am told, a heart of gold, together with quick judgment 
and complete fearlessness. 

He gives me a military cape to replace my heavy fur 
coat, and we start out to Camp Meudon, farther up, 
where we are presented to another commandant who 
is frankly, though politely, surprised to see a woman 
where no woman has been. 

A few harmless jokes about being at Meudon, yet, 
alas ! so far from Paris, are exchanged, after which, fol- 
lowed by the armed escort, we mount through the wet, 
shabby forest to the very top of the Molkenrain. There 
crouching in some bushes we peer out through them to 
the Hartmannswillerkopf, that culminating, coveted 
point of the great plateau, where men have wrestled 
imto death these four years past. Brown, withered, 
not a tree on it left, its form is traversed only by a long 
black line — the German trenches. 

Behind and on each side of "Le Hartmann," as it is 
called "for short," is a great, misty, German plain; 
toward the left, in the extreme background, is the three- 
crested hill of the "Hohkoenigsberg"; great flamelike 
patches of cloud lay upon it, transmuting its stones and 
mortar into something gorgeous and unsubstantial. To 
our right and beyond stretched another great German 
plain, in front of which curtains of sun-shot cloud were 
falling and rising. One moment villages and fields 
and white ribbons of road shone, the next they would 
be blotted out by pillars of mist, and others came into 
view. 

"If they see us, they will fire," warned the com- 
mandant as I made an involuntary movement to rise, 
when another quick diamond-like shower beat about us. 

"But isn't it too dark?" I asked; that world of the 
Hartmann sector seemed so indistinct in shifting light 
and rain. 

"They've seen us when it was darker than this," he 

134 



THE HARTMANNSWILLERKOPF 

answered, rather grimly, with the expression of one 
remembering lost men. 

Passing to another vantage-ground of the Molkenrain, 
whence we could see the Sudel, now entirely in French 
hands, we met a group of blue men, emerging beautifully 
out of the colored mist under the silver heaven. They 
were carrj'ing hot soup to other blue men in the brown 
trenches of the Hartmann. 

Standing for no uncompleted emotions as far as the 
Hartmann is concerned, Captain Perdrizct stopped 
a glowing-eyed, red-cheeked, black-haired Meridional 
stripling and told him to let me have a taste from the 
can he was carr^ang. I drank, thinking "there are many 
ways of winning the war," from a dipper for which a 
trusty, much-camouflaged hand had first to hunt in its 
steaming depths. As I thanked him I wondered within 
myself should I wish him a quick young death or a 
long life and a toothless old age? As will be seen I'm 
obsessed by the veterans. 

About this time Commandant Moreteaux said: "But 
Madame will only have seen the Hartmann in mist 
and rain. Why not come a second time and lunch with 
me to-morrow?" 

I looked at Captain Perdrizet, he at me, and both 
being, as I have said, mortals of "first movement," and 
knowing holy enthusiasm, we accept — though I bethink 
me somewhat late of our chief, the commandant of the 
Military Mission, who marks the shining course of my 
Alsatian hours, and who might have other plans. It 
was "to see." 

As we came down in the gathering gloom, over the 
shell-ravaged sides of the mountain, I was conscious of 
a deep, in some way sweet, feeling that I might be going 
to see, to feel, it all again. And, too, as is the way of 
the heart, it seemed then somewhat to belong to me. 

I was not as one who never more will pass. 

135 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

Everywhere in the brown, wet forest pale-blue forms 
stood aside to make way for us. As we reached Camp 
Wagram, where I re-exchanged the long, blue military 
cape for my coat, great shots began to echo through the 
hills, and the flare of guns illuminated the thin, dark, 
scraggly crests. It was still war. Near, so near, men 
were breathing out their souls, to be "scattered by winds 
and high, tempestuous gusts." 

As we stood making our adieux, a radio was brought 
to Commandant Moreteaux, and we heard then and 
there that Foch had received the German Parlementaries, 
and given them seventy-two hours, from eleven o'clock 
of that day, Friday, to say "Yes" or to say "No." 
Nobody spoke when he ceased reading. It seemed 
suddenly like the world's end. 

And it's a good, quick place to get one's world-news, 
there in the Hartmannswillerkopf sector! 

Then we said another and quite hasty au revoir, 
fearing night would descend upon the valley before we 
could, for the motor had to go without lights, and there 
was many a turn and twist at which to take a skidding 
chance at fate. 

The forest got blacker and blacker, there was the 
sound of rushing waters, the rattle of munition-wagons, 
the stamp of hoofs, and voices of dimly outlined men 
whose tunics were quite white in the twilight. The 
odors, too, deepened with the coming darkness. I was 
chilled in body and soul, for were not they also there, 
those other tens of thousands, whose beds were dug 
in these damp hills, mingling in some way with the 
living? How close the two worlds are I never knew 
until this war, where death is ever near, and sometimes 
sweet, and often, often young. The hoary Reaper 
with his scythe has been replaced by a figure, lithe and 
strong, a bugle in his hand. 

As we reached the dark valley the cannon cracked 

136 



THE HARTMANNSWILLERKOPF 

again, again the night sky was ilhimined. The un- 
natural shapes of trees fallen one against the other at 
sharp angles were black in the twilight fog; the road 
was a loose, wet ribbon; more waters rushed. And 
who would see the Hartmannswillerkopf in sunshine? 
This damp, gray, afternoon robe of consecration^ 
clasped with its clasp of emerald, camelian, topaz, 
amethyst, like to the clasp of a high-priest, is its true 
garb. And the wide mantle of the November night 
was folding close over all its beauty and its grief. 

At Bitschwiller we call on Madame Jules Scheuer. 
She knows irremediable grief and bears it with a noble 
courage. One of her sons fell far from her in Champagne ; 
the other, mortally wounded on the Hartmann, was 
brought down one winter night to die in her arms, and 
lies forever in the sweet, broad valley of the Thur, 
claiming so little of his vast inheritance. . . , 

To the popote at eight. Six Protestant pastors had 
been announced to dine with us, two of mine in the act 
of being convoyed through Alsace by four of theirs. 
The Americans were "looking over the ground," they 
delicately informed me. I didn't ask "what ground"; 
with my name it might have sounded argumentative, 
which I never, never am. 

Now diiring these days of my Alsatian visit I had 
thought, at intervals, that it might very possibly be a 
nuisance to have a woman always tagging at some 
polite heel or other, but when I saw that six pastors 
could happen to them all at once, I then and there 
ceased forever feeling apologetic. I even fell to thinking 
that they hadn't done so badly when they got me. 

I can't say that, at dinner, all went as merry as a 
marriage feast, because the Americans didn't speak 
French, nor the officers English, except de Maroussem, 
who could but didn't, even seeming but remotely inter- 
ested in watching them consume the plenteous repast. 

137 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

And as for mj'-self , I was too dull with fatigue and too 
spent with the emotions of the Hartmann to be able to 
do any "paying in person." For a time, too, those men 
of my race were the strangers to me, not the blue-clad 
men of the Mission. 

Suddenly, as we were unsuspectingly taking our coffee, 
one of the shepherds began saying prayers over us with a 
drop in his voice after each sentence, thanking God 
for their being there, for our being there, for Alsace 
being there, and I don't remember what else, save that 
it was fairly comprehensive. After which everybody 
signed everybody's menu, and then as they were on the 
run through the garden of Alsace, lingering nowhere, 
though scattering possibly seedless blessings every- 
where, they said good-by and went out forever into the 
rain. And they ought to have thanked God for the 
dinner, which was a triumph, with vintage wines served 
by two orderlies, under Monsieiir de Maroussem's 
chic though somewhat detached eye. 

As the door closed we fell to talking as people would 
when six clergymen who came all at once leave all at 
once, though unexpectedly one came back for his um- 
brella — producing a momentary hush. 

One of mine had generously given me several boxes 
of cigarettes, produced from deep, sagging pockets, 
and we stopped to have an "evangelical puff" as some 
one called it, while I tried to explain what "nervous 
prostration" is to those Frenchmen — and to explain 
why the largest of the American clergymen, very nice, 
and looking like a lion-tamer, as some one remarked, 
could have had it, and been in bed with it, for a year. 
"Chacun a sa petite misdre," one of them said, "mais 
c'est strange, tout de meme." 

One of the officers of the St.-Amarin popote, Debrix, 
is the image of the famous Coligny, and so called by 
his comrades, but he is, it appears, an excellent Papist, 

138 



THE HARTMANNSWILLERKOPF 

while Perdrizet, who, if he had on a suit of mail, might 
have borne the banner of the Virgin, following Godefroy 
de Bouillon into Jerusalem, is an equally excellent 
Protestant, his family having fled to Montbeliard after 
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and these two 
are continually being joked about their natural — or 
unnatural — camouflage. But in these days nobody 
really cares, alack! alack! what anybody believes, 
scarcely, alack! what anybody does, especially if they are 
quiet about it and it doesn't interfere with the other 
person's plans. And that's why the war will be for- 
gotten just as soon as the newspapers stop talking 
about it and business looks up and the women get new 
clothes, which they need. However, as the dead soldiers 
will mostly be in heaven, their smiles won't be too 
unkind, though their language! — if it's anything like 
what I've discovered they use on earth! 

I was finally convoyed home by a largish contingent 
of the sons of Mars. As soon as we stepped from the 
door we were in ankle-deep mud; the sky, black and 
flat and close, had a vaultlike heaviness, and the 
fog was so clinging that I was as if wrapped in some 
soft, wet stuff. Monsieur and Madame Helmer were 
kindly waiting up for me, but mercifully let our good- 
night be short. And here I am with no more thought 
of sleep than a meadow-lark at dawn, though that's 
my only resemblance to the meadow-lark, for I am 
tired, dead-tired, and my hair is still wet with the 
mists of the Hartmann. 

And how shall one sleep who has so lately touched 
the fringe of the mountain-couch where many soldiers 
He? 



XIII 

"les cretes." "dejeuner" at camp wagram. the 
freundstein and its phantoms 

ATOVEMBER gth.— This morning at eight-thirty we 
•* V started out, Captain Perdrizet, Lieutenant Debrix, 
and I, for the famous trip along the crest of the moun- 
tains that, on one side, hang over the valley of the Thur, 
and on the other fall toward the Germanics. Having 
beheld with my eyes the first and second line defenses 
of these crests and of the "Hartmann," I have come 
to some slight realization of how men have lived (and 
died) four winters through on these weather- and shell- 
swept heights. 

We had to go to the very end of the shining valley 
before beginning the ascent to the crests, passing Wes- 
serling, situated so charmingly on its eminence in the 
ancient moraine, commanding the valley from both 
ways. Once upon a time the Chateau of Wesserling 
belonged to Prince Lowenstein, Abbot of Murbach, 
the history of the great Abbey of Murbach being closely 
bound up with that of these valleys, for Charlemagne 
gave to the first abbot, St.-Pyrmin, the whole country 
of the Thur, with St.-Amarin and Thann and all the lesser 
towns. In the eighteenth century the Abbey was con- 
verted into a noble Chapter with residence, and a big 
new church, at Guebwiller, now in German hands. But 
the Chapter had a short life there, and probably not a 
gay one, and during the Revolution it was suppressed. 
The vineyards round about have been renowned 

140 



LES CRfiTES, CAMP WAGRAM, FREUNDSTEIN 

since time immemorial, and on Giieb wilier 's southern 
slopes there is a wine celebrated even among the most 
celebrated of Alsace, which enlivens without making 
noisy, and inspires without depressing (evidently what 
the juice of the grape was meant to do when the vine grew 
on the first hillsides of the world). It is called "Kit- 
ierle briscmollcts'' ("Kitterle break your calves"), those 
whom it delights evidently not journeying far, except 
in fancy. 

A great book could be written about the wines of 
Alsace, the soft, gleaming, light-colored wines of this 
land of sunny slopes, which may become even as a Mecca 
for pilgrims arriving "dry" from over the seas. In 
fact, quite a delightful perspective opens itself out. 

From Wolxheim comes a 'udne, once the favorite of 
Napoleon, which was always found on the imperial 
table. There are the wines of Rouffach, "home town" 
of the husband of Madame Sans-Gene; of Kaisersberg, 
knowTi fashionably and pertinently as "Montlibre" for 
a short space during the Revolution, and by the "Rang" 
of Thann; Alsatians once swore, "Que le Rang te heurte!" 
("May the Rang strike you!") There is, too, an excep- 
tional, ancient, red vintage called "Sang des Turcs," 
whose name recalls the twilight days of Turkish inva- 
sions and Soliman the Great. 

But the Alsatian wines are mostly made from com- 
pact bunches of little, white, sweet grapes, with irislike 
colors shading them richly. The inhabitants, holding 
their pinard in great veneration, feel it a sacred duty 
to see that it is good. It is called colloquially "th4 
d'Octobre'' ("October tea") one of the officers told me, 
after the manner of the famous "purie septembrale" 
("September puree") of Rabelais, who, it appears, greatly 
appreciated the wines of these hillsides. But they are 
pitiless concerning poor wines, which they call "fiddlers' 
wines," or " Sans-le-Sou,'' or " gratte-gosier'' ("throat- 

141 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

scratcher"), and " grimpe-muraille'' ("wall-climber"), as 
he who drinks them is apt to try that and other useless 
feats, instead of sitting and dreaming or joking and 
being happy. These bad wines are also known col- 
lectively and disdainfully as vins des trois hommes 
(wines of three men) because it appears it takes 
three men to accomplish the feat of drinking a single 
glass — the man who supports the drinker, the man 
who forces the treacherous liquid down his throat, 
and the third the unhappy victim. Now the once 
rich soil of the ancient mellow vineyards has got thin 
and stony; for the men who have grown them have 
been occupied with killing these past four years, and 
neglect for even a season can spoil the best and oldest 
vines. 

In times of peace there are many textile manufactories 
in these valleys, too. After the Napoleonic wars la 
main d'ceuvre (labor) was scarce, just as it will be after 
our war, workmen being brought even from India, 
and to this day in the midst of modern machinery here, 
in the valley, there are places where they still keep to 
the ancient block system of stamping cloth, with the 
ritual hammer-stroke, this process giving more fadeless 
and beautiful colors than any machine-stamped, aniline- 
dyed stuffs that ever were. Such cloths are still called 
"Indiennes." 

And all around here the Swedes did as tidy a bit of 
work as was ever done by invading armies, the seven- 
teenth century being for the valley a century of ravage 
and desolation. In one of the books^ Mr. Helmer 
gave me last night I read that the cantons were so 
reduced during the Thirty Years' War that places like 
Bitschwiller could register but four adults and eleven 
children, Moosch eleven adults and twenty-three chil- 
dren, St.-Amarin thirteen adults and forty-four children, 

^Gilles Sifferlen, La Vallee de St.-Amarin, 1908. 

142 



LES crEtes, camp wagram, freundstein 

and so on, the chief of their diet being acorns and roots 
and mice and other classic nutriment of epochs of 
destruction. There were moments when the Imperials, 
the Swedes, the French, and the Lorrains disputed the 
territor}^ and various troops camped on the Hartmanns- 
willer and descended to the valley — and the Roi Tris 
Catholique was the ally of the Swedes, and the Abbey 
and its territories were under the Holy German Empire. 
But whoever was momentarily in possession, it was 
always disastrous for the inhabitants of the valley — 
and of what the children suffered these fatal figures I 
have quoted evoke some dull perception. 

As we pass the pleasant villages of Fellering and 
Odern and Krut, all shining in the radiance of a strong 
though intermittent sun, with here and there scarfs of 
rainbow-like mists draped about them, w^e foolishly 
mocked the weather wisdom of Mr. Helmer, who, on 
being asked as we started out, if the weather would 
hold, had regretfully said, "No." 

At Kriit we start to ascend the Wildenstein. Gor- 
geous matutinal effects continued their prismatic play 
everywhere on soft and fathomless black hills, the 
yellow lights on the meUze almost outshining the sun. 
On one mountain-side they made a line as would some 
procession of pilgrims bearing torches, and one almost 
thought one saw cowled heads and heard the chanting 
of a "Pilgerchor." 

The air we were breathing was strong yet tenuous, 
and I felt a great refreshment and exhilaration. 

In these wide days of bending the hills, of folding the 
valleys, there has been, as it were, some unpacking of 
my mind, some shaking out of my soul, things long 
hidden have come to light, and the patched lining of 
memory has been freshened. Almost every event has 
appeared, accompanied by its secret meanings, in its 
relationship to secondary, generally unapparent, signifi- 

143 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

cances. I have had, too, a quickened sensitiveness to 
the beauty of the natural world. And can a journey 
do more for one than this ? 

It was a stiff mount to Huss in a sort of distilled 
pine fragrance, with a continual looking back, where 
the billowing lightsome pink and yellow scarfs, woven of 
sun and mist, were flinging themselves more and more 
wastefully about the shining valleys. Near the top our 
motor's botigies got clogged with oil, and a thin, white 
fog, now opaque, now sun-shot, began to close in on us. 
We arranged the bougies, but there was nothing for 
human hands to do about that white fog, and we found 
ourselves suddenly, at a turn in the road, tightly in- 
closed by it, and were seemingly alone on the heights, 
where the only thing that appeared to grow and thrive 
were the stretches of wire entanglements, like great 
patches of dried heather. Everywhere were groupings 
of black crosses, with their tricolor badges, above wind- 
swept, fog-enveloped, sun-bathed graves, dug on these 
treeless heights. 

But there, in that thin, high air, I suddenly became 
conscious of the volatilization of the spirit, and knew 
those graves indeed for empty. . . . 

One last time, as we passed Camp Boussat, named after 
the colonel who fell here, and looking like a mining- 
camp, the mist shifted, showing the jeweled, gossamer- 
clad valley, and then we were again fog-locked, and I 
saw its beauty no more — only brown seas of wire 
entanglements losing themselves in those shrouds of 
cottony white, which lifted here and there to show some 
detail of the strange life on the bleak crests. There 
were dugouts everywhere, and very low buildings 
camouflaged in wood-colors and crisscross designs. 
In them were men washing, men cooking, men smoking, 
all in astonishment, which sometimes gave place to 
grins, and doubtless pleasantries in the best Gallic 

144 



LEs crEtes, camp wagram, freundstein 

manner, at the appearance of the weaker sex on their 
grim, bare mountain-tops. 

We passed endless gun-emplacements, and cemented 
munition-depots, barely visible through thick layers of 
pine branches, and near them heads would be sticking out 
of what seemed mere holes in the earth. 

About this time Captain Perdrizet, whose ardent spirit 
had been considerably dampened by the closing in of 
that thick, cold fog, began also to fear we should be late 
for dejeuner at Camp Wagram, from which, it appeared, 
we were separated by several valleys and a few hills 
of the eternal sort. The motor's bougies got clogged 
again (what part of its being they are I know not); 
the chauffeur got moody. Captain Perdrizet more 
visibly vexed, Debrix quieter and more philosophic 
(he is a litterateur when there's no war, and has written 
a beautiful poem about Thann) ; as for myself, knowing 
strange and enkindling things were behind me, others 
doubtless before me, and that whatever happened would 
be interesting, I felt myself sweetly detached from time 
and circumstances, which for one of deadly punctuality 
is saying much. 

A peculiarity of the motor's ailment was that it 
couldn't go down as fast as it could go up, so, a-limp, 
a-crawl, a-hump, we descended into a valley packed 
extravagantly with that thick, imspun cotton-like 
atmosphere, leaving the dead and living alike to their 
bare heights. At a certain village whose name I forget 
(I can hear the reader saying, "Thank God she has for- 
gotten it, and we can perhaps get on to Camp Wagram 
for lunch") — at a certain village, however, I repeat, two 
ravens went across our path, going to the left of the 
motor. Said Perdrizet, on taking in the dire occurrence, 
his color like to the white fog and his hair and mustache 
like to the raven's, "We'll never get there!" 

Now I am superstitious, too, and glory in it, for, though 

145 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

it gives me a good deal of otherwise avoidable worry, it 
colors life. From time to time friends and circum- 
stances load me with a new one, and I go staggering on. 
Two ravens crossing the road to the left was a novelty, 
and I see anxious days to come when motoring for 
engagements where one must be in time — or one thinks 
one must. And superstition has nothing to do with the 
processes of the brain, rather lodges itself elusively 
anywhere and everywhere in one's being. 

The two officers consulted their timepieces again, 
finding a trifling and consoling difference of twenty 
minutes (looked at from one way). The chauffeur's 
watch didn't go, and I never carry one. As the motor 
stopped again, Perdrizet began to fidget extremely 
much, and to say that if it weren't for me he'd kill 
the chauffeur, and decided that we couldn't take in the 
village of Goldbach, almost entirely destroyed in this 
war, where Madame Sans-G^ne first saw the light of 
day, and later the duke. 

However, in spite of the two ravens and the Erdwible,^ 
or other spirits of those forest-hills, we at last found our- 
selves twisting up the road to Camp Wagram, an hour 
late, and we began to sound noisily the horn of arrival. 
The commandant and his young captain had been long 
awaiting us on their hillside. With many apologies on 
our part because of the delay, and on theirs because 
of the fog, we went into the little, low mess-room built 
of rough boards, with its heavy camouflage of fresh 
pine branches on its low roof, its windows of oiled paper, 
and its sides painted like a green-and -yellow tiger. 

The commandant did something to his watch as we sat 
down, and then gallantly yet imblushingly remarked 
that it was just 12.30, but that even had we been late it 
would have only meant a longer anticipation of some- 
thing pleasant. My companions both gave smiles of 

^Fairies: kindred to the "green people" of Ireland. 

146 



LEs crEtes, camp vvagram, freundstein 

satisfaction for that, on the Hartmann, where men 
are ahnost entirely concerned with kiUing or being 
killed, the commandant was living up to the French 
reputation in more ways than one. I thought, too, 
that it was a very happy beginning, looking well, so 
to speak, among the hors d'ceuvre. Captain Pcrdrizet 
had told me the day before that if the commandant 
had to requisition every man and mule in the sector 
there would be an excellent lunch. Now the very good 
food was accompanied by a delicious, warm Burgundy 
from the commandant's own part of the v/orld, and at 
dessert a bottle of Pommery & Greno, very cold, a 
souvenir of his service in Champagne, was poured. All 
drank sparingly of both, after the manner of Latins. 
Some asked delicately, even humbly, as one really 
wanting information, concerning the rumor that the 
United States were "going dry," and wondered why 
it was to be. I rather wondered myself, up there on the 
Hartmann, forgetful for a moment of the unpleasant 
things I know about distilled liquors in the Home of the 
Free and the Land of the Brave. 

Said the commandant, puzzled, looking at his not 
large glass of ruby liquid, ' ' Un peu de vin en mange ant, 
tout de memef ..." ("But a little wine at one's 
meals? . . .") 

Said another officer, with a quickly restrained gesture 
of distaste: "Est-ce mai qu'il faut boire seul et debout et 
entre les repas en Am^riquef" ("Is it true that one 
must drink alone and standing up and between meals 
in America?") 

I was saved an answer to this question, which was a 
fairly near picture of some of the national customs, by 
the shaking, deafening sound of an exploding shell. 
Those paper windows didn't seem to mind it, though 
everything on the table rattled. The commandant 
looked at the captain, who disappeared, returning almost 

147 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

immediately to say that an artilleryman with his horses 
had been killed — and the doctor, who had started to 
the door, sat down again. 

A few minutes later, as we were beginning the tourne- 
dos grilles, maitre d'hotel, the telephone rang, and a 
radio was brought in hot and given to me for a souvenir. 
It was one sent by the German parlementaries saying 
that as they were unable to get back to Germany by 
road on account of broken bridges, they would be 
obliged to proceed by air, and that their 'plane would be 
marked by two white flames — zwei weisse Flammen. 

"It sounds safe, but all the same I don't envy the 
officer detailed to accompany them," said somebody; 
and they all smiled and seemed glad they weren't in 
the airplane. I've noticed in the past two or three days 
that military men are beginning to prize life again. 

I was sitting opposite the commandant, on my right 
was Doctor Lantieri with four stripes on his sleeve, and 
on my left was young Captain de Santis, who had met 
us. Curiously enough, both were of Corsican descent, 
and showed it so distinctly that when some one men- 
tioned the great Italian bag of Austrian prisoners after 
the cessation of hostilities, and how the "Tiger" had 
said you simply couldn't hold them back, I got a bit 
worried, though nobody else seemed to mind. 

The young captain took from his pocket a couple of 
proclamations dropped by German aviators on the Hart- 
mann yesterday — and furthermore presented me with a 
large panoramic view of the Champagne sector, where 
he had fought. I thought it was something rightly 
belonging to his family, but there was that in his proud, 
Corsican gesture which forbade refusal. 

After which, being the only woman who had ever 
lunched in the H. W. K. sector, I was photographed 
by the doctor with the four stripes. Then in a fog 
thickly enfolding us, as well as the mountains, we 

148 



The German People Offers Peace. 

Th^ aew German democratic sovernment hu this programme: 

"The will of tbe people Is the bigheet Jaw.'* 

TIm Oermftn people wants quickly to end the slaughter. 

TLe new Germao popular governmeut therefore has offered aa. 

Armistice 

aod has declared itaelf ready for 

Peace 

on the basis of jtutiee and reconciliation of nations. 

It is the will of the Oerman people that it should live in peace with all 
peoples, honestly and loyally. 

What has the new German popolar ^vernment done so far to put into practice 
the will of the people and to prove its good and upright intentions? 

a) The new Oerman government has appealed to President. Wilson 
to bring about peace. 

It has recognized and accepted all (he ' principles which 
President Wilson proclaimed as a basis tor a general lasting 
peace of justice among the nations. 

b) The new German g^jverament has solemnly declared its readiness to evacuate 
Belgium and to restore it. 

c) The new German government is ready to come, to ^ honest understandinif 
with France about. 

Alsace-Lorraine. 

d) The new German government has' restricted the U-boat War. 

No passengers steamers not carrying troops 
or war materia! will be attacked In future. 

e^ The new German govemmeht has declared that it will ■ withdraw dll 
Oerman troops tfack over the German frontier. 

. f) — The new German g-overnment has asked the Allied Governments to. 
name commissioners to ag^ree upon the practical measures of the 
evacuation of Belgium and France. 

These are the deeds of the new German popular government. Can 
these be called mere words, or bluff, or propaganda? 

Who is to blame, if an armistice is not calfed now? 

Who is to blame if daily thousands of brave soldiers needlessly have to 
shed their blood and die? 

Who is to blame, if the hitherto nndestroyed towns and villages of France 
and Belgiimi sink in ashes? 

Who is to blame, if hundreds of thousands of unhappy' women and children 
&re driven from their homes to hunger and freeze? 

The German people oiers its hand 
for peace. 



149 



LES CRATES, CAMP WAGRAM, FREUNDSTEIN 

started out with gas-masks, compasses and pistols, 
plus an armed escort, toward the German lines, for they 
wanted to show me the ruins of the Castle of Freund- 
stein, now an observation post, directly overhanging 
the great plain I had seen yesterday. Much banter 
between the commandant and Captain Perdrizet, their 
eyes very alert, as to the right road, the one that wouldn't 
lead us into the enemies' hands. Suddenly a firing of 
French guns began right over our befogged heads, with 
a near swish and crack, and answering duller German 
guns. In the thick fog, even those men accustomed to 
sensations seemed quite keyed up, and the commandant 
had become like some woodsman, looking closely at the 
trunks of battered trees, some with old scars, some with 
new, and other indications, invisible to me, along the 
path. Finally, at a certain crossroad, he stopped, say- 
ing: "That would lead us straight to them. Even 
now a pointed casque might appear, though, with the 
probable armistice in sight, they will be less venture- 
some." 

I: "What would they do?" 

He: "Throw hand-grenades first and then" — he 
looked at the others — "there'd be a scuffle." 

It didn't sound attractive, I must say, the potenti- 
alities of the fog seeming even quite horrid, and I was 
entirely ready to hunt in the opposite direction for the 
path to the Freundstein, which, according to the com- 
pass, lay pleasantly due west. Dreadful, unexploded 
things, too, were lying about, in new and ancient shell- 
holes, and there was much careful stepping among 
broken tree-trunks and half-demolished barbed wire, 
and I got a horrid rip in the last of my American boots. 

Here and there was a black cross, and the possibility 
of being underneath one, instead of above one, if we 
did meet a German patrol, came before me. With all 
one's poetizing or philosophizing, there is a difference, 

151 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

and one's a long time dead — as I know Lieutenant 
Lavall^e would agree. 

Suddenly the path began to rise, the commandant 
giving an exclamation of relief as he saw a steep ladder 
almost in front of us, apparently leaning against a 
wall of fog. Captain Perdrizet's eyes began to shine 
again; he'd been quite subdued, not to say cast down. 

"It's like a scene of opera, isn't it?" he exclaimed. 
And then he proceeded up the ladder, tipped, it seemed, 
at an angle of forty -five degrees the wrong way, I wonder- 
ing how on earth I was to get down, unless I fell. Then 
we descend from a ledge over heaps of century-old, moss- 
grown mortar deep into the tower, and, passing through 
a long, subterranean passage, find ourselves in a tiny, 
closet-like room of ageless masonry. Stationed at an 
opening are two men with telephones over their ears, 
binoculars, compass, and charts lying on the sill of the 
opening in the masonry, which is shaped like this /^ ^N>. 
and looks to the northeast, toward the Hartmann and 
the Sudel, and other consecrated heights, as well as the 
great, covered German plain — whose contours were 
more impenetrably veiled than its future. I had had 
a feeling, crouching in the wet bushes the day before, 
gazing out on its wide splendors in shifting sun and 
shower, that I would look no more upon it, nor upon 
the little, worn, brown crest of the Hartmann, cut 
by the black line of the German trenches, running 
through the naked wilderness of branchless trees — 
though I had not known why. 

When we had blithely retraced our steps to the high- 
road, cracking many uncomplicated jokes, pleasing 
largely because we felt that kindness toward the universe 
so distinctive of the front, when no actual killing is 
going on, we suddenly encountered, almost bumping 
into them, two swearing, sweating, heavily laden poilus, 
who had got lost in the fog looking for their detachment. 

152 



LES crEtes, camp wagram, freundstein 

On seeing us they threw down their accoutrement on a 
wet bank and expressions strong and classic began to 
cut the air. A sergeant, risen up from somewhere at 
the unmistakable sounds, ran toward them, calling and 
gesticulating wildly. But, wiping their brows, they 
continued. They had taken the last step they were 
going to on that so-and-so and so-and-so mountain, 
and if they found their detachment or not they enfichd'd 
themselves, only they didn't use this elegant word to 
express their sentiments. The sergeant got more ex- 
cited, and cried, "Espdces dc types" and At this 

the commandant, foreseeing that the artillery exchange 
might get too loud for feminine ears, said to the biggest 
one (both were enormous), seeing his number: "You 
are looking for Camp Meudon, mon ami. It's farther 
up ; in an hour you are there. Follow the path up and 
always to the right." 

On which, like lambs, they who had sworn not to move 
from that spot till the hill crumbled shouldered their 
accoutrement, thanked Perdrizet in the best French 
manner for the cigarettes he gave them, and disappeared 
quickly, the strains of " Madelon " being loudly borne 
back to us on the fog. 

"Ce sont des enfants'' ("They are children"), said 
the commandant, with his kind smile, "and good 
children." 

And that was the last word I heard concerning the 
war and "les enfants de la Patrie" on the Hartmann, 
for the hour of farewells had come. 

And how deep was the mutual well-wishing enfolding 
that moment those who have seen peace breaking over 
the graves of the Hartmann, as I and they saw it, 
alone can know. 

As we parted, they taking a higher path, disappearing 
almost immediately in the fog, and we the lower road 
back to the motor, I suddenly understood, too, the new 

153 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

look one sees in all men's faces. Everywhere it is the 
same. It is that of men who have been ready to die, 
to "separate from the pleasant habit of existence, the 
sweet fable of living," but who suddenly know they 
need not die, at least not now — nor that way. 

Coming down the heavily shrouded mountain-slope 
as quickly as possible, to be in time for my adieux 
to St.-Amarin before hastening over to Masevaux that 
same evening, Captain Perdrizet told me the legend 
of the "Phantoms of Freundstein." I was then at a 
point of fatigue where present emotions were no longer 
possible, and time works such wonders that the most 
tragic tale of Freundstein, the Rock of Friends, was even 
as a poultice. And I could still be interested in hearing 
that to this very day there is a proverb, "Er isch vom 
Freundstein'' ("He is from Freundstein"), which, said 
of a man, means so hospitable is he that his house 
belongs to his friends. And the legend runs after this 
fashion : 

The last of the lords of Freundstein, Count Jerome, 
had a beautiful daughter, Christine by name, whom he 
adored, and whom he took with him everywhere, even 
to the chase, for which purpose a gorgeous litter had 
been made wherein she might rest. The Lord of 
Geroldseck, passing by one day, saw her as she lay asleep. 
Struck by her loveliness, he swore then and there that 
he would make her his. 

Soon after he proceeded to Freundstein to ask her 
hand in marriage, but she answered that it was useless, 
as her heart already belonged to a certain very noble 
cavalier of Thann. Her father gave the same answer. 
One night a great noise was heard before the gates of 
Freundstein; it was the Lord of Geroldseck come with 
his vassals to take the castle and its lovely young 
chatelaine by assault. Freundstein resisted for three 
days. Then, seeing it was in vain, Christine and her 

154 



LES crEtes, camp wagram, freundstein 

father took final refuge in the high tower whose ruins 
rise above the chamber where we found the men with 
the telephones strapped to their ears. There had once 
been a sloping stairway in the tower, so broad that a 
horseman might ascend it. Up this road the Lord of 
Geroldseck pursued them. Arrived at the top, he was 
about to seize the girl, but her father, taking her in his 
arms, leaped with her into space. The gesture that 
Geroldseck made to retain her whom he loved caused 
him to lose his own balance, and he, too, fell and was 
killed. And their ghosts forever haunt the spot, and 
the echo, no matter what words are cried to the hills, 
always gives back the last, despairing call of Geroldseck : 

"/e t'aurai, je Vaurai,je t'aurai." * 



^"I will have thee, I will have thee, I will have thee." 
II 



XIV 

RETURN TO MASEVAUX 

ATOVEMBER gth. — I was received so warmly by the 
■^ ▼ amiable Demoiselles Braun, who had my room ready 
for me; so kindly by Captain Bernard, who came a mo- 
ment afterward to tell me he would call for me at seven- 
fifteen; so dearly by Laferriere, who also called for me, 
that I felt I had indeed got ' ' home. " As we were walking 
along to the popote Captain Tirman joined us in the 
darkness and told us that Bavaria had proclaimed itself 
a republic, and that there was news (military news by 
radio) of the abdication of the Kaiser. Somebody cried, 
"Demain, de quoi demain sera-t-il fait?" as we entered 
the house where the little cat, the forgetful, unabashed 
little cat, who but three short days before had done 
such well-nigh disastrous things to my fur coat, also 
awaited me. 

Again a charming dinner, conversation about that 
first August of the war, the retreat from Mons, of 
Charleroi, and many, many other places; of forced 
marches and aching feet; of fatigue and hunger and 
thirst, now packed away gloriously in memory, though 
sometimes the strange look appeared on their faces as 
they talked. Stories were told of those who had gone 
to "faire un bridge d Limoges"^ and remained there, and 
of others, like Mangin, who had come back, Mangin, 



^ "To play bridge at Limoges" means that an officer is temporarily — 
or permanently — retired before the age limit. "Eire limoge," to be 
limoged, is another familiar form. 

156 



RETURN TO MASEVAUX 

the booty of whose glorious Tenth Amiy now overflows 
the Place de la Concorde. And of Foch who had nearly 
gone there. And of the immense glory hanging over 
each and every battlefield, for, though black crosses 
were evoked, each was entwined with colors too bright 
for human eyes. And then we turned our thoughts 
from tempus lachrymarum to the New Day, in whose 
sun, though not like to the brightness of those fallen, 
we all shine. The long destiny is heavy and dark beside 
the light, bright way of heroes, and never did one 
realize till now how truly the gods love those whom 
they snatch young. We, after all, as one of the officers 
remarked, will die in our beds or by accident — and is it 
so desirable ? 

Then Serin told his oft-repeated, but now dearly 
loved, story of ''Bravo, Capitano," of the Capitano who 
thanked the Madonna for the thirteen trenches and 
the sea of barbed wire between himself and the enemy, 
but which I won't tell. And Captain Antoni told the 
stor>^ of the wounded Boche who was given the Croix 
de Guerre, and how the French general said, as he entered 
the hospital ward : 

"Are these the brave men who so valiantly held their 
position on the twenty-fourth ? With inexpressible pleas- 
ure I give each one his well-merited Croix de Guerre," and 
then proceeded down the line of beds. On Number 33 
was lying a man with closely bandaged head, only one 
gleaming eye visible, and the Croix de Guerre was pinned 
also on his valiant breast, and if it was removed by the 
Angel of Death or by orders of the colonel I forget. 
Neither is it recorded if the German smiled. 

And I told of the swift passing of the autos, mine 
and the commandant's, on the dark hills of the Route 
Joffre, when I was coming back from St.-Amarin and 
he going there. How sadly I had seen its kind lights 
rise along the heights and disappear, and there had been 

157 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

no friendly handclasp on the hills, nor words of thanks 
from me in the dim light of the blurred Pleiades and the 
young, half-veiled, white moon. 

After dinner some one hazarded the word "bridge, "but 
there must have been that in my eye making for solitude 
rather than companionship, for the next thing I heard 
from some Frenchman, perceptive as to woman's looks, 
was: 

"Madame est sans doute bien fatigu^e et nous jouerons 
demainy 

And soon I was stumbling home on one or two or 
three blue-sleeved arms, in the inky darkness of a star- 
less and moonless Masevaux. 

I had found St.-Amarin charming, and I left with 
deep regret, but at Masevaux I was experiencing the 
sensation, very agreeable, I must say, of one who, having 
wandered, returns to his or her first love; and any one 
who has done it will know exactly how I felt, and I 
don't have to tell them. As for those who have never 
returned, they wouldn't understand if I did explain. 



XV 

THE VIGIL OF THE ARMISTICE 

" The Star is falVn and Time is at his period" 

J^OVEMBER nth, i A.M.— At ten-thirty Captain 
■^ ▼ Tirman came back to the popote where we were 
playing bridge — S6rin, Laferriere, Toussaint, and T. 
He was very pale, but there was something shining 
about his face. 

"^a y est, V armistice.'' 

Dead silence; we don't even drop our cards. In his 
excitement a very naughty soldier's word escapes him. 
He turns away in consternation, and the others, some- 
what appalled, too, at last drop their cards. I try not 
to smile. General recovery; they hope I didn't catch 
it. It was sufficient, however, to break that strange 
feeling of absence of feeling that each one of us was 
experiencing. 

"Alors c'est fini, la guerre,'' some one finally said in a 
dazed way, and with the words the cruel thing seemed 
to drop heavUy from us, as would some hideous, exhaust- 
ing burden. 

Toussaint, with his far look of one who loves forests, 
very strongly marked, said, "To think that it has found 
us like this playing bridge at the popote!" 

Serin: "I'll not go to bed to-night." 

I: "Oh, my friends!" and then nothing more — my 
knees suddenly as if broken. 

Laferriere (very quietly, after a pause) : "I cannot 
but think of those who are not here." And his words 

159 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

evoked great shining bands of the dear young, pressed 
closely, one against the other, out of their flesh, crowd- 
ing the heavens. 

Then Serin, again with his bon sour ire d' enfant, "II 
faut hoire." 

A bottle of Asti spumante is produced by Laferriere, 
who in a dreamy way remembers that he is chef de popote. 
The stock of champagne is exhausted. Nearly every- 
day, and sometimes twice a day for the past week, have 
not the radios, plucked out of the air by the commandant, 
plus the beauteous communiques, necessitated the open- 
ing of bottles even unto the last? 

Serin, as we drink, all of us paralyzed by the sudden 
cessation of the world-horror, tells how one of his 
gendarmes would keep referring to the armistice as "la 
Mistie," in two words, and we drink to la Mistie. But 
in spite of the too, too simple joke, how still, yet stern 
was each one's heart! 

About this time Toussaint seizes from the stove the 
marble "hunk" (it's the only word for it), "Amor 
condusse noi,'' and makes as if to throw it at the dead 
and gone Oberforster's clock, stopped, as I said, some 
four years ago at 12.25. 

Serin again, with his most childlike expression: "La 
Paix a eclate! Peace has broken out, and I will break 
out worse than peace if I don't do something!" 

As I have said, Masevaux at that hour — it had got 
to be eleven o'clock — was as lustrous as an ink-pot, 
and all being still the prey of a strange paralysis of 
feeling, nobody suggested anything. 

Peace, lovely, precious peace, dreamed of, desired 
through years of anguish, so redly bought in money of 
the heart's blood, was ours! Those crowding hosts 
gone out into the "dateless night" seemed suddenly to 
return, the only moving things on a stunned earth. They 
had not renounced in vain the dear clothing of the flesh. 

160 



THE VIGIL OF THE ARMISTICE 

But how could we understand in one moment the 
immensity of what had happened? Never have I felt 
myself so small, so almost non-existent — an insect that 
had fortuitously not been crushed. But the soul's great 
converging point was reached. The war was done and 
won. Men need no longer kill each other by the tens 
of thousands, nor need women by the millions, because 
of it, weep. 

We touched glasses again, but quietly, oh so quietly! 

Some one sighs and no one speaks. After a while 
Toussaint, standing by the stove, again fingers "Amor not 
condiisse," but it is taken out of his hands by one of the 
officers. Then Serin suggests waking up the cur6, 
getting the keys of the church, and ringing the bells. 
Tirman, in authority in the absence of the commandant, 
still at St.-Amarin, is gripped by that conservatism 
known to each and every one in command at great mo- 
ments, and becomes cautious, even suspicious. 

"Mais nan, c'est peut-etre tout de mime une blague. 
Attendons jusqu'd demain." (He has quite recovered 
from his naughty word.) 

Some one insists, "But Headquarters wouldn't joke 
about a thing like that." 

Tirman, however, sits down at the piano, breaks out 
into the "Beautiful Blue Danube" and refuses to have 
the bells rung. 

Serin: "But what can one do here at Masevaux, 
black as the ace of spades and everybody snoring! A 
Paris, il y aurait moyen de Jeter mime si cest une blague!'' 

I : " You are ready for anything. ' ' 

He: "Et comment!'' With a light in his straight- 
forward good soldier's eye, and somewhat as a child 
longing for the impossible, "Just think of them in 
Paris, the restaurants full, et des femmes sentant bon!" ^ 

^ The next morning I learned that S6rin, who had been "ready for any- 
thing, et comment," had gathered together, being chief of the Gendarme 

l6i 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

Then four dazed officers accompanied by a dazed 
lady proceeded to awaken the postmaster from his 
slumbers. That heroic expression of rejoicing accom- 
plished, we groped our way to the Place du Chapitre. 
In one of the chanoinesse houses Captain Bernard also 
dwells. Sometimes he has headaches on account of his 
wound, and to-night he had left us early to go home. 
On his not answering, some one hazarded the remark, 
"Perhaps he isn't there" (Heaven knows there's nowhere 
else to be but where one belongs, at Masevaux!), and it 
proved, indeed, to be pure defamation, for after a while 
he appeared at his window, or rather one heard him 
saying: "What's the matter? I was sleeping the sleep 
of the just." 

"Ca y est, V armistice, '^ some one cried out. 

Then that man, who had been through every campaign 
and would forever wear "Verdun" stamped on his brow, 
made no answer. 

And the night was dark, dark, the lovely moon too 
young to wait up, even for peace. We stumbled across 
the roughly paved square to my dwelling, and there we 
clasped hands with a strange, new clasp, and I, the 
woman and the American, wanted to say something, 
anything, but I had only begun, ''Mes chers amis," when 
I felt my voice break. I turned quickly and went in. 
What need to speak? Hearts lay open that night. 

2 A.M. — Have been reading to quiet the heavily 
throbbing nerves. Picked out of the bookcase an hour 
ago UHistoire des EUves de St.-CUment, Metz, 1871. 
The names Gravelotte, St.-Privat, Malmaison, Sedan, 
confuse themselves in my mind with Ypres, Verdun, 
with Belleau Woods, with St.-Mihiel, Suippes, Eparges. 



Service, those of his men who were watching over the slumbers of Mase- 
vaux and quite simply "opened wine" for them, drinking solemnly 
again to "la Mistie," while they as solemnly drank to the health of their 
respected chief. So do great hours fulfil themselves in httle ways. 

162 



THE VIGIL OF THE ARMISTICE 

I remember being told that in a terraced ccmeter>' at St.- 
Mihiel three thousand Germans sleep. Though friend 
or foe, this night I see them all arisen, standing each 
one by his grave, clad in horizon-blue, khald — or field- 
gray, all those who at some word of command had 
left the "pleasant habit of living, the sweet fable of 
existence," and I whispered in great need of consolation, 
"I know that my Redeemer liveth and at the last day 
we shall rise." 

J A.M. — And how shall sleep come, lovely sleep, 
desired like the morning? I slept not that night of 
the 3d of August which held the whole war in its 
darkness, and now with the youth of the world lying in 
"the grave's quiet consummation," shall I sleep? 

Then slowly I became conscious of emanations from 
a giant, near people in defeat, not knowing what new 
thing to will, casting off the old fidelities, which once 
had given them the horn of human plenty. Thrones 
were shaking; "when peoples rage, kings must weep"; 
a world was to be remade out of empty places and 
blood. ... I remembered how a poet ^ had cried out, as 
a prophet, after that other war: 

Ton peuple vivrCy 

Mais ton empire penche, Allemagnel . . . 

And then I fell to thinking on love, I know not why, 
unless it was for the millions of lovers taken so sud- 
denly from the world, or because of those yet left. How 
shall I say? But I knew that there were three things, 
not two — the lover, the beloved, and love. And of this 
last and separate thing one can have, in extremely 
sensitive states, impersonal cognizance, when for some 
reason (again what know I?) fancy has been set free, 

^ Victor Hugo, Alsace et Lorraine, 1872. 
Thy people will live, 

But thine empire topples, Germany! . . . 
163 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

imagination stirred, and they go flinging themselves, 
not so much about the personal as about the common 
destiny. For a moment, so brief that it was gone 
even as it came, my soul caught the light that hangs 
over dear, persistent, far, illusory hills of fancy and 
inclination, and felt the mysterious break of feeling on 
the dim, shadowy lake of the heart. Vague, beaming 
forms passed along its shores, dissolving, lambent out- 
lines, awakening desire for all the beauty of the wide 
earth, for things not in my personal destiny, and which, 
if they were to be, would be no better than that which is, 
not even so good. It was the greed of the human 
heart. . . . 

And I cried out from my many-times-tumed pillow, 
"O Life, O Love, O Death, O too, too fragile illusion 
of existence!" 

4 A.M. — ^A soft, rich-toned bell is striking. A cold 
breath comes in at the window, a cock crows. There is 
the first sound of the click of sabots across the square; 
the Day of Peace is about to break over the world. 
But here in the bed of the young deserter from the 
German ranks, dead in Champagne, the war still has 
me in its arms and presses me close to its cold, oozing 
breast. The familiar odor of drying blood comes to me. 
Old groans strike on my ear. Those who, dying, are not 
dead crowd about me, and the "blue-black cloud" 
envelops me. I am weary unto dissolution. And 
Sleep, darling Sleep — not even a brush of your wings 
against me! 

In this early morning, in the "little hour before dawn," 
the grief of the world sits tight about my heart — the icy 
hurt for things dead and gone, and the heaviness of 
those who awaken to a world empty of what was once 
the heart's concern and desire. 

Old distastes, too, press on me, old distastes, I say, 
not hates. How hate any one like unto myself, hurry- 

164 



THE VIGIL OF THE ARMISTICE 

ing along the night-path to the grave, mutual, frightened 
possessors of a shadowy, urgent immortality? 

For these last few years I have entered, as it were, 
into some knowledge of charity, not that I like every- 
body, but I have come to realize that the distaste is 
often in myself and not due to some fault or lesser 
excellence in others. Truly in this whole journey I 
have encountered but two whom in an idle, hazy way 
I did not like; one was of an amorjDhic species and the 
other had judgments too violent, and at the same time 
too conventional and platitudinous, to permit interest. 
But even of these I shall ultimately think with indul- 
gence. 

5 A.M. — Closed the book recording the deeds of 
those young, long, long fallen of St. -Clement's school, 
and I pass to thinking how the word now on the lips 
of the world is freedom. 

But is not the deepest wish of the human heart for 
love which is never free, but alw^ays in bond to that 
which is its hope and its desire? And I cried out con- 
cerning freedom what once in the world's greatest hour 
was cried out concerning truth, "What is it?" and 
begged that it might show its true form and aspect, 
above all to one who, invested with incredible power 
b^^ a great people, would seem to hold even the lightnings 
in his hand. 

More sabots click across the square, and a pale light 
sifts in at the top of the curtains. It's the eighth day 
of Creation. Innumerable men have stood (and so near 
me) their last night through in the trenches. . . . 

Yesterday with its happenings seems a thousand 
years ago. I had motored with Laferri^re to lunch at 
Dannemarie across a rich plain, through Morzwiller, 
where Alan Seeger spent a week with the Foreign Legion, 
and spun who knows which of his young and gorgeous 
fancies? 

165 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

Now, as then, the long street of Morz wilier was 
crowded with a highly colored, exotic regiment, and 
we were stopped a moment by a detachment passing. 
In front of the red-roofed, cream-colored inn, with its 
yellowing grapevine cUnging close and flat, a young 
officer in the strong, mustard-tinted khaki and red 
checchia of the Moroccans was getting off his horse, a 
blooded, white, long- tailed beast of Araby; on his 
breast was a blaze of decorations and there was some- 
thing implacable in his young glance as he looked about, 
and something very straight in his mien — a man who 
had been at his enemy's very throat, or drawn the 
sucking bayonet out all red. Two or three men of his 
regiment, wearing also their crimson checchias, were 
sitting at a table drinking a light-yellow wine. A 
woman came out, emptied a pail, called to a cat. A 
very young girl behind her made a slight sign to one of 
the men sitting at the table. In another minute we 
had passed on. 

Everywhere in the rich fields were great brown 
stretches of barbed-wire entanglements, repeating the 
rusty tones of the beech forests which fringe them. I 
asked Laferri^re what would become of those thousands 
upon thousands of kilometers of barbed wire. He an- 
swered indifferently, as one does of things past, "Little 
by little the peasants will use the poles for their kitchen 
fires and the wire for their hedges." 

And we continue through that flat yellow and green 
and brown world to Dannemarie, one of the "terri- 
tories" of the reconquered triangle, drawing up before 
some sort of government building, known to German and 
to French administrators, in and out of which American 
soldiers are now passing. I ask one of them where 
their officers are quartered, thinking to pay my respects 
after lunch. There is a vagueness as he asks of a 
passing comrade, "Say, 'ain't we got a major some- 

i66 



THE VIGIL OF THE ARMISTICE 

where here?" The flooding Americanism of my soul 
is for a moment stemmed; then we go over to the 
popote, where we are to lunch with Lieutenant Ditandy, 
in charge at Dannemarie. Laferri6re, always ready to 
praise his comrades, tells me that he is possessed of much 
energ}^ good sense, and decision (rather in our Ameri- 
can way, I found later) and the "territory " has flourished 
under him. 

Pleasant lunch, enlivened by some last German salvos, 
which shook the windows and caused the glasses on the 
table to ring. Much and easy conversation — as we 
ate the classic Alsatian dish of sauerkraut, boiled pota- 
toes, and pork, and the equally classic pancakes — mostly 
about the irrealizable and irreconcilable dreams of small 
and penniless nations, springing up like poor and un- 
thrifty relations at the day of inheritance. And how 
amusing, even, the adjustments might become, once the 
blood-letting had ceased, though everybody felt more 
or less of a pricking in the thimibs at the thought of 
Vaprds'guerre. One could not then foresee that the 
movement of the Peace Conference would be about as 
rapid as that of the notoriously timeless glacier. Nor 
was it given to prophets to foretell the exceeding glitter 
of its generalities, nor how those same small nations, 
without a cent in their pockets, some even without 
pockets, like the Zulus and Hottentots, would multiply 
a hundredfold in its dewy shade. The metaphors are 
mixed, though not more so than the theme, and unfor- 
tunately it won't "be all the same in a hundred years," 
everything having been taken into account except the 
future. 

After lunch we start out in the motor driven by the 
swift yet careful chauffeur, accompanied by a doctor 
d deux galons, who speaks English very well, but 
doesn't understand a word I say — and my English 
is generally intelligible, though perhaps one wouldn't 

167 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

know right away if I came from England or the United 
States. 

We passed the high, broken, pink viaduct of the 
railway, looking, against the near Swiss hills, like a bit 
of aqueduct in the Roman Campagna, though without 
any beauty of light. It had been destroyed the first 
days of the war, rebuilt, again destroyed, and then 
abandoned. 

We were running straight toward the trenches, 
through that green and gold and brown autumn world, 
the road screened by wire netting interwoven with 
pine branches and broom, and there were kilometers of 
cloth screening, too, torn and flapping. The lines are 
but a few yards distant, and everywhere between us 
and them are the brown lakes of barbed wire. 

At St.-Leger an infantry band is playing the terrible, 
the gentle, the dolorous, the gorgeous, the human, the 
superhuman "Sambre et Meuse," which will forever 
evoke those seventeen hundred thousand sons of France 
who to its beat marched to their death. We stop to 
listen. A veteran of 1870 (no village seems to be com- 
plete without one or more) comes out, his green-and- 
yellow ribbon in his rusty buttonhole, and gives Lieu- 
tenant Ditandy a toothless, palsied salute. Black-clad 
women are grouped about the blue-clad band, under 
a great yellow chestnut tree. The mustard-tinted 
khaki and red checchias of a passing Moroccan regiment 
give a last deep accent to the color of the scene. And 
for a long way our road runs like this : 

G-ERr^AH LIMES 






OUR. V^o>»^'C> 

168 




THE VIGIL OF THE ARMISTICE 

We continue swiftly through villages shot to bits 
and deserted save for the troops, Quatridmc Zouaves 
mixtes, they mostly are, quartered within their crum- 
bling walls. There are tattered cloth screens for camou- 
flage hung across the streets, as electioneering signs 
would be hung, or the banners of festivities and welcome. 
Open-mouthed, the soldiers see the auto pass where 
for two years no wheeled thing has rolled. If men went 
there they slipped silently behind the screens and under 
cover of night, with food and munitions or carrying 
wounded men. 

As for me, I begin to feel like a cross between Joan 
of Arc and IMadame Poincare. 

Lieutenant Ditandy points out ''le Bcc de Canard,'' 
the duck's bill, a long tongue of Swiss territory that 
juts in comfortingly between the French and German 
lines, and is greatly beloved by everybody. 

On the outskirts of the battered village of Seppois 
we pause ; a few more turns of the wheel and we would 
be in full sight of the German lines. I make good my 
woman's reputation for lack of sense of responsibility 
and beg to proceed. Lieutenant Ditandy, however, 
caps daring by a somewhat belated prudence (there is 
something bold and hard in his eye when it's turned 
toward the enemy) , saying : 

"We ought not to be here; as it is, our safe return 
depends on whether a German officer sees us and, 
seeing us, thinks he might as well turn the mitrailleuses 
on. The first man to be killed in the war was killed 
near here — it would be too stupid to be the last." 

Laferriere: "Not to speak of the incident it would 
create, and if the colonel sees us — well, the prison at 
Seppois isn't inviting." So we turned toward the 
Swiss frontier instead, and I thought deeply, sweetly 
on her so dear, so near, as I looked toward these hills 
enfolding her, the best loved of my heart. 

169 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

Then we turned another way, passing again through 
Seppois. Arab troops are quartered there, and we were 
held up by the sentinel, who wanted to see our papers. 
He was dark of color, delicate of hand, straight of nose, 
and wore his military coat buttoned by one of its top 
buttons in such a way that it fell with an effect of 
burnous. He couldn't read French characters, so he 
called to another thin, small-handed, straight, coffee- 
colored man, who might have been his twin, who couldn't 
read them, either, and finally they both threw up their 
slender hands, resembling those of some antique bronze 
of an adolescent, after which we passed on. And I 
told Sarin's story of the Arab guard who held him up 
one dark night, in the trenches, but generously gave him 
tire-lire, tu ne passes pas!'' ("You can't pass unless 
the countersign, saying to him, "5i tu ne dis pas 
you say tire-lire!") 

They're cold, these Arabs, they're gray with cold, and 
they don't know why they fight, nor whom, but they 
follow their officer to the death, and, if he falls, lose 
heart under these gray skies with which Allah seems 
only remotely connected. 

And then we turned back and went through young 
woods where countless thousands, no, millions of shells 
were piled on shelflike receptacles, as one would pile 
bottles of wine on cellar shelves. Everywhere were the 
words "Route interdite" "Defense de passer,'* and we 
passed, until we came to Faverois, with its old, old 
church on the top of a tiny hill, over which the town 
spilled. The broad, low steps of the chtirch were made 
of ancient tomb slabs, and, stooping, I saw, on one of 
them, half obliterated, "in pace," and "i6 — ." 

There was much that was unspoiled, or more likely 
forgotten, in the interior. A suave-expressioned St.- 
Sebastian, with dimpled limbs, so evidently unfit for 
the arrows that transfixed them, and something yearning 

170 



THE VIGIL OF THE ARMISTICE 

and earthly about his eyes, was above the Louis XV 
altar; quite unmistakably he was of the gay century. 
In another niche was an unknown saint, dressed like a 
personage of opera; three plumes were on his head and 
he wore a golden shirt of mail and high, fringed boots. 
At the side-altars were charming, very pure models of 
angels, and bow-knots and shells (I mean, for once, 
5ca-shells) . As we came out we noticed that the roof 
of the church was painted a silver-white and that of 
the old house nearby, with the round tower, was 
painted the same way, and other houses, too, and 
when we asked why they told us it shone like crystal 
at night and was to warn airplanes of their nearness to 
the Swiss frontier. 

A blue group of poilus was standing on the crest of 
the street, looking at a newspaper. One cried out in a 

loud voice, "Guillaume a ," only one can't write the 

word. And going up we saw the news of the Kaiser's 
abdication in letters quite American in size. 

Then in a very understandable zeal that I should miss 
nothing, the doctor d deux galons, espying a khaki figure, 
said, "There comes an American," and I saw approach- 
ing a blond, round-faced young man with spectacles. 
Something leaped within me as I turned to him. But 
he answered me in the stifiest German accent possible, 
"Ja, pig news"; and when I said, "Yes, we've won 
the war!" he answered, "Well, I do t'ink we god 'um 
shust now." Unreasonably, the thing that had leaped 
within me lay down. I said, "Good-by." He said, "So 
long." And so much for American meeting American 
on the hill of the village of Faverois. 

Laferriere had marched all through this coimtry, 
sac-au-dos, and in one place he buried a comrade, and 
in another he knew hunger and thirst, and in another 
he had watched the day break after a night battle. 
There is a history to Faverois, too, but I don't know it, 

12 171 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

and it's just as well, for I would be sure to tell it in this 
long vigil, and I must finish with the war. 

Back to Dannemarie, the chauffeur driving like the 
wind, and Lieutenant Ditandy finds out where the 
American officers have their headquarters. There is a 
battalion ^ attached to the Seventh French Army. I 
am conducted over a muddy street, past two classic 
dung-heaps, the kind so evidently handed down from 
father to son, and go up some dark backstairs, and there 
Colonel Wing and Major Griffiths are rung up by an 
orderly. I give my name, and they all know of me. 
In a moment appear, young and slim and untried and 
eager, the colonel and the major, glad to see an Ameri- 
can woman in Dannemarie. And then they took me 
to their more than simple quarters out through another 
door and another court, where there was the usual mud, 
but only the scent of a vanished dung-heap. How many 
good American dollars they had "planked down" for 
this priceless compound I know not. After a while we 
walked back to the motor waiting in the square, and 
I presented them to the French officers. One of them 
said he had been at Plattsburg with my husband that 
first historic summer, and spoke of General Wood, 
whose aide he had then been, saying, with a flush, "He 
is the greatest man in the United States, as well as the 
greatest general," and there in the square of Dannemarie 
I thought, "Magna est Veritas," and then, "Too late, too 
late." 

On our way home, not far out of the town, we come 
across a group of Americans and French colonials stand- 
ing by the road. Lying on the embankment was a young 
man with a fractured skull, his face deathly pale, except 
for the contusions, already swollen and blue. His hair 
was matted with blood and his red checchia lay in the 
ditch. The stern young officer of the many decorations 

1 Battery B, 42d Artillery C. A. C. 

172 




AMERICA AND Al.SACli 



THE VIGIL OF THE ARMISTICE 

(there were three rows of them) that I had seen descend- 
ing at the inn at IMorzwiller, was there, on his beautiful 
mare, and he held the halter of another very good beast, 
the one that had just unhorsed his rider. We got out 
and the 3^oung man was placed carefully in our motor 
to be taken to the hospital at Dannemarie, after which 
we started to walk back to Masevaux — about thirty 
kilometers. In war-time you don't wonder "can you 
do it," you just start out; sometimes you get there alive, 
sometimes you don't. This turned out all right, for 
shortly after our motor, which had met an ambulance, 
came back for us. 

And then we found ourselves passing through a sun- 
set-world, cut by a bar of level light, so strangely thick 
where it touched the golden earth that it was almost 
like a ledge or a wall over which we looked into wind- 
still, purple forests, and above us, like the tarnished 
gilt ceiling of a temple, was the pale, amber sky. We 
talked somewhat of hope, somewhat of life, from which 
the red thing had so suddenly gone, as they alone can 
talk who have laid their heads close against the cruel, 
beautiful, full breast of war. 

As we drove into the Place du Chapitre a delicate 
white moon, seen through the nearly bare lindens, was 
hanging in a deepening sky, close above the soft, dark 
roofs of the houses of the chanoinesses. There was no 
breath of wind. No cannon sounded. One's heart, too, 
I found, was very still. Millions of men waited face 
to face in dark lines, and that same moon touched their 
bayonets, their helmets, and their drinking-cups. The 
sun had set upon the last day of the World War. . . . 

The maid who brings my breakfast as I lie half dead, 
but not asleep, after the burning, consuming night, 
opens my blinds. 

French and American flags are flying from many win- 
dows. Something wets my eyes. Then — if in my flesh 

173 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

or out of it I know not — I see a strange brightness filling 
the Place du Chapitre, and a further glory bathes my 
being in such sweet and cooling waters that I again am 
strong to pass, with the Sons of Victory, into the New 
Day. 

In the old house are sounds of feet running to and fro. 
From our windows also blue and white and red flags 
are being hung. In the street are heard, "C'^^ y est, " and 
"U armistice est sign6.'' 



XVI 

DIES GLORIA 
"0 Eastern Start Peace, peacel" 

AND I arose and went to the church where there was a 
>• great ceremony, for it was the feast of St. -Martin, 
patron of Masevaux, as well as the end of the war. . . . 

Afterward I stood outside on the wide rose-gray 
steps, under a sky of matchless silver-blue, among 
groups of villagers, soldiers, and officers. A blue in- 
fantry band, grouped under that blue vault against 
the pink church, played the "Marseillaise" and "Samhre 
et Metise," with a great blare of trumpets, quickening 
the heart-beats, then "The Star-Spangled Banner," and 
many eyes were wet with tears of hope and loneliness. 

Amid the throng I noticed some new silhouettes, 
always in groups. They were those of husky young men 
in civilian holiday garb; flat, black hats, short, black 
jackets coming only to the waist, long, tight, black 
trousers, pink vests, and high, white collars. These 
young men, who looked no one straight in the eye, were 
strange-souled ones who had burned with no fever of 
combat; the lamp of no cause had shone before their 
faces ; they had known no country for whom 'twas sweet 
and fitting to die. Free not to serve in the French army, 
out of reach of the German authorities, they had passed 
from adolescence to manhood during the World War 
unsplashed by blood. And they will be a generation 

175 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

apart. Even as they appeared on the day of victory 
in groups, apart. Later, in tribulation of maturity, in 
weakness of old age and fear of death, they may sigh 
that they were not among those who "dying are not 
dead," and would exchange the worn drapery of their 
couches for the "blue-black cloud." And those who 
have not known a hot youth will know a cold old age. 

A motor was standing under the lindens of the Place 
du Chapitre and by it a black-bearded, giant chauffeur 
who might have been among the hosts of Louis le 
Debonnaire on the Field of Lies. I got in with Lafer- 
riere and he took me up on a hillside, and from the height 
showed me a last time the kingdoms and principalities 
into which his race had come. The plain shone in a 
blue and exceeding beauty; we ourselves were caught 
in a glistening web of air shot with color by the low- 
arching November sun. Marking the course of the 
great river was a line of mist shimmering in the 
same warm- tinted sun of Indian summer. "L'^t^ de 
St.-Martin" indeed. Here and there villages shone 
brighter than day, and the hills were deep-colored, yet 
soft and unsubstantial. Victory, like a shining, soft- 
rolled ball whose tangles were hidden, was in our hands 
— or like to a crystal sphere as yet undarkened by 
events. 

The grass of our hillside was dew- wet in the sun, 
white and frosty in the shade. Each fallen, rust-colored 
beech leaf, each scarlet cherry leaf, was set with some- 
thing glittering. All, all was a-shine. Even the heart, 
too, after the dark years. 

I cried within myself, though I might have said it 
aloud, "O beauty of life, why art thou so often hidden? " 
And I had in mind the eternal years, though the new- 
bom hour of victory was so passing sweet upon the 
hillside. 

And looking at the splendid river whose course was 

176 



DIES GLORLE 

marked by the shining band of mist, I thought how 
deep the Lorelei was hidden in its timeless waters, 
though 'tis said she betrays but once those listening to 
her song. And long since, for the noise of battle, the 
hypnotic chanting of the Rhine-maidens lulling their 
nation to dreams of boundless might had not been 
heard. I thought, too, how the blood of the world's 
armies had put out the circle of fire about Brunnhilde, 
though whence it was first kindled it may be again 
rekindled; and for all our dead — and theirs — in the 
middle of Europe there are, I know not how many, 
tens of millions to whom the fire-music is their light and 
heat, the river the symbol of their strength; and what 
to do with it all? Walhalla has been destroyed in the 
greatest roar of sound mortal ears have ever heard, 
but that which wrought its pillars and its walls is still 
there, and in other wide-doored mansions Wotan's 
warriors may drink again deep cups of hydromel. 

Siegfried lies dead upon his bier, but Brunnhilde's 
candle throws a light upon his face, and though Loge 
seems no longer at his post, it is believed he waits some- 
where unseen, protecting, as best he may, the Walkyries' 
unquiet sleep, until they wake and ride again, crying, 
'' Je ho, je te ho! " inciting to battle and to sacrifice. 

And as nations always have the governments their 
mystical qualities create, in spite of the great defeat 
in the West and the solvent forces in the East, I thought, 
"Is anything really changed in Germany of that which 
makes each nation like only unto itself?" Old things 
may take new names, but, the blood-madness past, they 
will walk again the banks of their great river — listen 
once again to the Rhine-maidens, and Lorelei, combing 
her hair, will sing once more for them, while the wonder- 
working music that has so scorched us will draw again 
its circle. And the German people may be more porten- 
tous in defeat than when their armies were spilling over 

177 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

Europe — only, one who says this too soon will be stoned 
and one who thinks it not at all be deceived. 

Then from some distant church tower softly sounded 
the first noontide of peace, and, turning, I left the Ger- 
manics to their predestined fate. "He beheld and 
melted the nations," and truly of them may be said 
"Gliick und Ungluck wird Gesang.'' 

For to each one his own, and the power of rhythmic 
sound over the world's will can no more be separated 
from that nation's destinies than can certain inborn 
qualities of the French be separated from theirs. That 
pervading sense of style, that illuminating, stimulating 
art, their conversation, that incomparable arrangement 
of words, their prose; or, in the mystical realm, that 
bright and singular thing they denominate "/a Gloire," 
which one of my countrywomen ^ has written of in 
golden words, and that other peculiar and essential 
translation into habit and custom of the word "honneur," 
and many more deathless qualities that make France 
what she is and not something else. . . . 

Then I found myself following Laferriere over another 
diamond-set path of rustling autumn leaves, and we 
got into the motor and went down the hill into the 
befiagged and crowded town, drawn so brightly, yet so 
transiently, out of its antique obscurity. 

At the popote many guests were assembled, among 
them three men of the Anglo-Saxon race, come to eat 
in Masevaux the first-fruits of victory, and later, not so 
very much later, perhaps that very night, they were 
to tell of it to the world, each seeming to have, as it 
were, the end of a telegraph wire cuddled in his pocket 
by his stylographic pen. 

Many, I knew not who they were, came in after lunch 
to salute the commandant, whose house and heart were 
wide open that day. Black-robed, tremulous women, 

1 Edith Wharton. 

178 



DIES GLORL^ 

youngish officers with very lined faces on which, over 
night-loss and night-grief, was written something at 
once soft and shining and eager; but, with all the 
coming and going, a strange new quiet pervaded 
everything. Noise had, for a time, gone from the 
border-world. 

Afterward we were taken up to see the room once 
lived in by Anna, the wife, or rather widow, of the 
Oberforster. In it was the most extraordinary piece of 
furniture, designed to occupy two sides of a corner, 
that I have ever seen. It was a divan, a narrow, hard 
divan, at right angles with itself and upholstered in 
mauve rep. Above the narrow seat and reaching nearly 
to the ceiling was a series of mirrors set in woodwork 
like many panes of glass, the mirror parts too high to 
see oneself in. On the floor near it was a hard, tasseled 
cushion of old-gold satin on which I am sure no foot 
had ever rested, for it seemed rather to belong to the 
dread family of bric-a-brac. On the divan was a small, 
woolen-lace cushion bearing the words "wwr ein Viertel- 
siundchen" in shaded silks. 

Voluptuous the divan was not, neither was it respect- 
able, nor comfortable, nor practical, nor anything 
natural to a divan, but it doubtless represented some 
dim longing of the soul of her who bought and in- 
stalled it, some formless inclination toward beauty, 
out of the daily round of the good housewife; per- 
haps even a "soul storm," after the Ibsen manner, 
had so externalized itself. Who knows, or ever will 
know, or cares? 

The wide bed was of the newest and horridest of 
art nouveau, and over it was a spread of many pieces 
of coffee-colored machine-made lace put together with 
colored wools. There was a writing-table near the 
window at which you couldn't write, for all the writing 
space was taken up with little drawers or tiny jutting- 

179 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

out shelves, and an imitation bronze vase, holding some 
faded artificial roses, was built into it, where the hand 
would naturally slip along when writing. Over it, be- 
tween the windows, hung an illuminated verse, "Allein 
sollich denn reisen? die Heimat ist so schon." From the 
Oberforster's album some one took and presented to 
me a photograph of Anna, which I couldn't connect 
with that room, a rather sharp-nosed, mild-eyed woman 
whose head was leaning against her husband's head. 
And the husband is one among millions of husbands 
who lie in their graves, for whom the pleasant habit 
of existence is no more. 

Downstairs on their upright piano, in the corner of 
the dining-room, are those high piles of music of the 
masters, and much of it is arranged for four hands. 

In the afternoon a great weariness came upon me, 
and the light of victory seemed to pale, but I knew that 
it was only within myself, because of the long vigil in 
which I had burned both oil and wick. I stood listening 
for a while to the military bands in the Halle aux Bles 
and the Place du Marche, but the gorgeous fanfare of 
the trumpets reached me only dully, as from a great 
distance. 

Then many little boys, after the eternal manner of 
little boys, began to set off firecrackers, and the sudden 
noises hurt my ears. 

I went to my room, but was too wearied to compose 
myself to rest, and soon came out, chilly and wandering. 
The sun had set upon the square and something cold 
had began to come up from the earth; I seemed to have 
finished both joy and mourning. I thought that per- 
haps forever I would be alone, unable to partake of 
the world's gladness. 

I could not remember, in that afternoon ebb of vitality, 
that with the evening hours would come rushing in 
the tide of nervous strength, bringing again warmth to 

1 80 



DIES GLORIiE 

my heart, light to my spirit, and that buoyantly I 
would be treading the Via Triiimphalis of this border- 
land. 

A little later in a blue twilight, bluer close to the earth 
where those many Sons of Victory pressed, I walked 
out with Laferri^re past the ancient, evocative Ringel- 
stein, along the Doller, and we called on a very charming 
woman who had also seen the war of 1870 — Madame 
Caillaux. She gave us a perfect cup of tea and was 
flanked by no veteran, and she, the portion of whose 
youth and age had been war, was calm with the pleasant 
calm of those who harmoniously have sewed together 
the ends of life. 

When we came out a pale white moon had arisen 
over some black cedars planted near the door, and as 
we walked slowly back, saluted by blue-clad men, or 
standing aside to let munition-wagons rattle by, Lafer- 
riere told me of some of the glorious deeds of his com- 
rades of the popote, though no word of himself. 

In the Place du Chapitre the populace was already 
gathered about the fountain of the stone flame. It was 
like looking at an old print, recording old victories and 
old rejoicings, together with the eternal hope of the 
people that new victories, unlike the old, may mean 
new things for them. 

I felt through my single being the surge of the genera- 
tions, and against my hand the beat of the changeless 
human heart, forever quickened or retarded by the same 
things. Loving, hating, desiring, forgetting, and finally 
relinquishing its beat, because it must. Though I 
remembered that in aU times there are men who prefer 
something else to life. . . . 

In the evening Madame Meny gave a great dinner for 
the officers of the Mission, to which I was also bidden. 
Madame Meny is the daughter of Madame Chagu6 and 
lives next door to her mother in an ancestral home with 

181 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

high, sloping roof and deep windows, giving on the Place 
du Marche, overlooking the fountain, which I can't see 
from my window. The officers wore all their decora- 
tions and even gloves, and I felt as a wren might feel 
among the birds of paradise, and I wished again that 
I had brought a good dress and something sparkling 
for my breast. When dinner was half through came 
Captain Bacquart from Paris, belated on that Belfort 
train, still at its old tricks. He was slightly condescend- 
ing, as one might be coming from the City of Light to 
the dusky provinces, but everything he had to tell, 
even the things he had heard in the greatest solemnity 
from Ministers of State, had been grabbed by the Mis- 
sion out of the air before he left Paris, and in addition 
everybody knew a lot of things he didn't know, that had 
happened while he was on the way. But we did smile 
at the story of the routing out of a station-master, whose 
trust was train-schedules and lost articles rather than 
events, to be asked whether he knew if the armistice 
had been signed, by the species every station-master 
hates even in peace-times — that is to say, travelers — and 
"Saperlotte!" and "Nom de Dieu!" rose to the station 
vault when he found that that was what they wanted 
him for! 

After dinner there was music and for a last time I 
heard Lavallee sing of "la douce Annette. ' ' Then another 
officer whom I had not seen before. Lieutenant Ruchez, 
sang in a veiled but flooding voice many of Schumann's 
songs. It began by the commandant asking for the 
"Two Grenadiers," and for a time the old wounds 
ceased to burn, even though we thought of those many 
whose prayer had been "Bury me in the earth of 
France." On that night of victory he sang, too, in his 
musician's voice, "Du meine Seele, du mein Herz,'' and 
"Ich grolle nicht wenn auch das Herz mir bricht," and 
nobody found it strange. They knew how for all time 

182 



DIES GLORL^ 

lovers will tremble at the words, "Ewig vcrlor' nes Lieb," 
or in ecstasy cry out, "D/f mciuc Scele, dit mein Ilcrz," 
to the impulse of the immortal music. 

Afterward we sang the "Marseillaise" with further 
and deeper thought of those hosts who to its sound 
had gone up to a death of glory. 

Then M. M6ny opened more champagne and each one 
drained a last time the red-gold hanap of victory. 

And many, many shades haunt these borderlands, 
the clash of spear on armor mingling with the roar of 
75's and 42o*s. 

When we came out midnight was striking. The 
ancient square was dark and still where all the evening 
distorted forms had gesticulated in the flare of torches, 
crjnng of victor>' and, too, of freedom, the word I scarcely 
dare breathe, so strange and terrible may be its meaning. 
. . . Though what shall more deeply move us than the 
hope that the unborn inclination of our soul toward 
love in freedom shall find its being and its breath ? . . . 

The commandant and his staff accompanied me a 
last time across the starless, moonless square to my 
dwelling, where there was a close handclasping of friends 
in victory, for had I not been caught up in the apotheosis 
of the Mission ? I felt for a moment, as I stood on the 
broad steps, like a figure in the background of some 
great allegorical painting. 

For these men, as for me, the "moving finger having 
writ, was moving on." Soon they would go from the 
hillside to the plain they had so long looked down upon. 
And the scroll of their history there is tightly rolled, 
nor can any man say what is written on it. 

But this they knew, and with a point of sadness, 
that their work of intimate companionship, of trust, of 
hope and dolor shared in the valleys of St.-Amarin, 
Masevaux, and Dannemarie was already in the past. 
And all endings are sad, even those of victory. 

183 



ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD 

The next morning, in a pale, chill, shifting fog, through 
which I had glimpses of camions full of shivering, velvet- 
bodiced, black-bowed children en route for the Belfort 
train to Paris, and huddled veterans bound the same 
way, I passed forever from Masevaux, as a wind that 
goeth and returneth not. 



THE END 



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